How Ruben Gallego hopes his unusual path to the Senate will ‘nudge’ Democrats — and the chamber

By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN

(CNN) — The stretch of time between Ruben Gallego showing colleagues on the House floor how to hold pens as weapons to defend themselves against January 6 rioters and taking home the pen he used to sign his oath of office on the Senate floor is 1,458 days. The span between riding in patrol in Iraq to his wife telling him to hold still while she put his new Senate pin on his lapel is 20 years that, to him, can feel even shorter.

And it’s been less than three months since both he and Donald Trump, two men who could hardly have more different life stories or paths into politics, both won in Arizona – a state rapidly shifting demographically and convulsing politically.

“Life has been very interesting, to be honest. So there’s like nothing really shocks or surprises me anymore when things happen,” Gallego told CNN as he walked back from his ceremonial swearing-in in the old Senate chamber on Friday. “I’m just very lucky to experience a lot of good stuff, at least.”

Intense ambition and drive are what make Gallego like any other member of the Senate. It’s the rest that makes the 45-year-old Gallego an unusual fit for an institution that from the 1790s through today been dominated and mostly populated by older White men with a lot of money.

Pulling along an 8-year-old son who was already feeling tired and sick before he sullenly told Kamala Harris during the swearing-in photo-op that he was sorry she hadn’t won – the vice president hugged him and said, “Nope, we’re not defeated” – and carrying his sometimes squirming 18-month-old daughter on his shoulders, Gallego joked about not being in his old chamber for the House speaker vote and reflected on what he’d been through.

“I’m not that far removed from working minimum wage jobs. I’m not that far removed from sleeping on that floor [of the home where he grew up, one of four children of a single mother]. I’m not that far removed from going on patrol,” Gallego said. “Because it’s so recent, I’m going to be able to bring that real experience to them. And the ability to understand how hard it is to put make rent, how hard it is to access the VA, how hard it is to try to really accomplish the goals for your family and how you need to have a government that’s responsive to that.”

As he said this, an elevator door in the Capitol opened, and out stepped Dave McCormick, the Republican who poured millions of his own money from a career in finance into unseating longtime Pennsylvania political fixture Sen. Bob Casey. They shared a moment of recognition, a “Congratulations!” from one group of family members to another, a pat on each other’s upper arms that neither seemed fully comfortable with.

Time in a sandwich shop and the Marines

Since his narrower-than-expected win over Kari Lake in November, the Democrat has made the media rounds, chipping in ideas for what his party needs to do to start winning back more Latinos like him. He explains how he and Trump both won his state, despite his progressivism from growing up poor and first generation in Chicago vs. the president-elect’s ostentatiously wealthy nativist nostalgia. Voters, he said, were clearly looking for outsiders last year.

His swearing-in celebration in the basement of the Capitol Visitor Center included a wide swath of people, from his high school librarian to his first boss at the sandwich shop where he worked to help pay the bills. As they milled about the drinks and sandwiches, both Marines he patrolled Iraq with 20 years ago and members of the mariachi band brought in for the occasion grabbed selfies with him.

“Because of him, I have faith in this country. A lot of times I get down. Because of him, I have hope,” said Steve Zerlentes, who remembers teaching Gallego how to make Chicago-style hot dogs and cheese fries, and also remembers asking his new 16-year-old employee what he wanted to do for a job and laughing when the answer came back: “I want to be the president.”

He chuckled as he remembered Gallego’s reaction: “What’s so funny?”

“I said, ‘Good luck, go for it,’” Zerlentes said. “What am I going to say?”

Gallego laughed when he heard Zerlentes’s story.

“I did?!” he said. “I was crazy.”

Zerlentes wasn’t alone. Linda Connor, Gallego’s high school librarian, remembers telling him when he graduated that he was going to be president, and that all he had to do in gratitude for helping him out and hosting him for Trivial Pursuit nights at her house was to then put her in charge of the Library of Congress.

John Bailon remembers the first day he met Gallego, when they heard a new guy had just checked in to the Delta Company 4th Reconnaissance Battalion after graduating from Harvard. He recalled the reaction from when they heard the guy with the fancy degree wasn’t coming in as an officer: “Let’s go meet this idiot!”

They bonded over both supporting John Kerry in the 2004 election while many of their fellow Marines were more inclined to George W. Bush. They debated politics, whether troops like them should have been in Iraq. They never talked about Gallego running for office then, but all those days in training and then on deployment together ingrained so much else — how they all cleared their throats and walked, how they would hold up in combat when the time inevitably came.

Gallego wasn’t GI Joe. He was smart, in a way that could be frustrating to the people he argued with, but Bailon and others remember keeping pace with him. They remember when he tied a rope around the leg of a Marine who wouldn’t stop snoring to yank him to his side every time the noise started. They remember the day an IED killed his best friend after the vehicle Gallego was in rolled over it without setting it off.

Bailon is still a proud Democrat. He recorded an ad for Gallego in the Senate campaign. He says he’s frustrated that the win came in the same election that sent Trump back to the White House, but he believes that “time’s going to show” that the president-elect isn’t the right choice in the way that his friend is. Gallego talks often about how, especially now that he won the Senate race, he is the personification of the American dream, and Bailon says that’s exactly it: “Americans want to see someone who came from their neighborhood.”

Gallego argues that his politics are not progressive or ideological at all, but pragmatic. But now that he’s starting to figure out his new job in a new Washington, he says both his and Trump’s victories are a message which goes beyond the Arizonans who voted for both of them.

“Democrats need to figure out how to always be fighting for the little guy, because if not, someone else is going to take that mantle,” he said.

Andrew Taylor, who met Gallego when the Marines from Albuquerque were combined with a group from Ohio before being sent to Iraq, said that’s particularly important to people in his age group, those on the cusp of the end of Gen X and the oldest millennials, who were shaped by the September 11, 2001, attacks and the great financial crash a few years later, the first to see crumble the promises of what going to college and playing by the old rules was supposed to mean.

That Gallego got this far, Taylor said, might be a beacon that it’s not all lost.

On the left, on the right, for all the other political back and forth, “there are still a lot of people who feel like we can do that,” Taylor said.

Fitting into his new life in the Senate

The mix Gallego represents is already starting to play out. One of the Capitol police officers who was there on January 6, 2021, was invited to the thank you dinners with supporters on Friday night after his swearing-in. Utah Sen. Mike Lee – a conservative ally of the president-elect who in the days after the 2020 election initially urged the last Trump White House to look for legal avenues to pursue claims of fraud around the results but ultimately soured on the effort – heard that the mariachi band was going to be at his midday reception and asked to stop by. They probably won’t be cosponsoring much legislation together, but they’ve made a pact to at least practice their Spanish with each other.

Mark Kelly, who arrived in the chamber as a former astronaut and well-known gun safety advocate four years ago also amid a tight presidential election in Arizona, said he’s glad to have a new partner, with Gallego replacing Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, who also grew up poor and was known over her one term for being a constantly hard to predict force who ultimately quit the Democratic Party.

Gallego will be different from many in the Senate, but Kelly said that it comes down to being able to “nudge the thing in a certain direction. But there’s a lot of inertia, a lot of resistance.”

Asked whether he thought the new senator or the new president-elect better represents the future for the state they both won, Kelly said he’s putting his lot in with his own partner in Washington.

“I really believe in our country,” Kelly said. “So I think the future of this country is more in the line of what Ruben represents.

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