Ruben Gallego’s ‘Big Ass Truck’ Pitch to Fellow Democrats

In a political landscape still adjusting to Donald Trump’s return to power, Arizona Senator Ruben Gallego has emerged as a rare bright spot for Democrats — among their most unvarnished truth-tellers. Gallego, who won his Senate race in a state Trump carried, did so by outperforming Vice President Kamala Harris among key demographics and embracing a strategy that made cultural, economic and regional appeals many Democrats have thus avoided.

Gallego’s message was simple: understand working-class voters, especially Latino men, and meet them where they are — both literally and figuratively.

“We’re more stuck on appeasing a group of people who don’t actually represent any constituencies than on taking care of people’s real lives,” Gallego said in a wide-ranging interview with The New York Times Magazine in February.

He credits his appeal to his upbringing — with parents who immigrated from Colombia and Mexico, raised in poverty by a single mother, and his own journey to Harvard — as well as his fluency in the working-class vernacular Democrats too often ignore.

The ‘big ass truck’ theory of courting Latinos

“Every Latino man wants a big-ass truck. There’s nothing wrong with that,” Gallego said. “You get your troca, start your own job, and you’re going to become rich, right? These are the conversations we should be having.” Troca is Spanish slang for pickup truck.

Gallego’s success offers important lessons for Democrats trying to reconnect with working-class voters across racial lines. In an election where President Donald Trump made significant gains with male voters, particularly Latino men, and where masculinity was a central cultural issue, Gallego understood — unlike many of his fellow Democrats — that engaging in a culture war with men was not the right approach.

“A lot of times we forget that we still need men to vote for us. That’s how we still win elections. But we don’t really talk about making the lives of men better, working to make sure that they have wages so they can support their families,” Gallego said.

In that respect, his campaign hit on something of a cultural sweet spot. He visited construction sites before dawn to hand out tacos and talk politics with workers. “We sat down with Trump supporters. We weren’t afraid to talk to them,” he said. “And we did it repeatedly.”

‘Democrats are afraid to talk’

Longtime Republican strategist Mike Madrid, author of The Latino Century, told Newsweek that Democrats still need to focus on the economy and address the border — issues that handed Trump the White House for the second time. While the debate over tariffs has made headlines, it’s still unclear how the economy will perform and what impact that will have. The president’s approval numbers have been rapidly deflating when it comes to his handling of the economy, polls continue to show.

“If the economy improves significantly under Trump, it will be hard for Democrats to beat him or the Republicans,” Madrid said.

Gallego has also been unafraid to take positions that many Democrats have shied away from, including votes that break with party orthodoxy on immigration. He was one of only two Democratic co-sponsors of the Laken Riley Act, a Republican-backed bill that toughens immigration enforcement and was named after a Georgia nursing student who was brutally killed by an alleged member of a Venezuelan gang in the country illegally.

He also criticized the Biden administration’s handling of asylum claims, saying it allowed the right to define the narrative on border chaos. “We’ve been set back for years because we hesitated on asylum seekers when we knew in our guts that what was happening there was an abuse of the system,” he told the Times.

Still, Gallego stands firm that he opposes ICE immigration raids, mass deportations without due process and abandoning pathways for Dreamers to gain citizenship — positions that have been widely supported by Democrats in recent years.

However, he has stressed that Democrats need to engage with the real concerns many voters have around immigration, especially in purplish states like Arizona, where the lines between Trump voters and Democratic supporters are increasingly blurred.

“I think Democrats are afraid to talk to Trump voters. I think Democrats are afraid to talk to people that are going to criticize them,” Gallego said. His willingness to confront these issues head-on has won him credibility among voters who feel neglected or talked down to by political elites.

Pride, work and aspirational success

A major part of Gallego’s critique stems from what he sees as a disconnect between Democratic leadership and the Latino communities they claim to represent. This was an issue that became apparent during the campaign, according to Eduardo Gamarra, a political science professor at Florida International University.

“Hispanics are increasingly behaving like the general electorate,” Gamarra said. “The economy is the main issue, followed by concerns unrelated to immigration. Second- and third-generation Hispanics are also behaving more like their American counterparts, sharing similar cultural preferences.”

This shift is a reality that Elizabeth Vaquera, director of the Cisneros Hispanic Leadership Institute at George Washington University, believes Democrats must acknowledge. “We need to reframe the idea that Latinos are difficult to engage,” Vaquera said. “The voting gap comes at the point of registration, not interest.”

For many younger Latinos, cultural cues no longer come from the traditional Spanish-language institutions that shaped their parents’ upbringings. Instead, figures like Joe Rogan — who have large followings across demographics — are more likely to influence views on politics, masculinity and the economy.

Gallego has implicitly acknowledged this shift, emphasizing pride, work, and aspirational success. His messaging didn’t focus on taxing the rich or portraying them as enemies; it wasn’t condescending or bureaucratic or focused on “economic security.”

It was about abundance — to use a term popular on the left — providing to their families, improving their lives, and offering something familiar.

“People who are working class, poor, don’t necessarily look at the ultra-rich as their competitors. They want to be rich someday. And so they don’t necessarily fault the rich for being rich,” he said.

Gallego’s approach, as Democratic analyst Ruy Teixeira writes in his newsletter The Liberal Patriot, is exactly what the party needs — a focus on “abundance” for today. While many Democrats support policies that could reduce bills in the future, they may also raise the cost of the suburban lifestyle that many people, particularly upwardly mobile Latinos, aspire to now. Teixeira argues that this ideal — the affordable suburban dream — is how “abundance” should be defined.

“Call it the ‘big-ass truck problem.’ Any abundance approach in a populist era needs to reckon with this problem. Otherwise, like the other Democratic approaches, it will fall short among the populist working class.”