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Depending on whom you ask, Sen. Ruben Gallego of Arizona is either the future of the Democratic movement or Kyrsten Sinema 2.0, a self-serving climber willing to abandon his party, and his stated principles, for personal gain.
The first-term senator has been trying to establish his identity as a straight-talking, MAGA-friendly liberal for several months now. During last year’s campaign, he aligned himself with the Phoenix Police Department by supporting its opposition to a federal consent decree after the Justice Department found that the police force had discriminated against racial minorities for years and violated the rights of homeless people. Earlier this year, he co-sponsored the Laken Riley Act, a MAGA-fueled anti-immigration bill that some of his colleagues denounced for its potential civil rights infringements — a seeming about-face for a lawmaker who once vocally opposed racial profiling.
And he drew backlash earlier this year when he co-hosted a ritzy fundraiser with Trump-supporting venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, whose technocratic “manifesto” in 2023 was derided in The New York Times as “A Tech Overlord’s Horrifying, Silly Vision for Who Should Rule the World.”
But to hear Gallego tell it, he’s giving Democrats a model to follow.
At a town hall Saturday in Pennsylvania, he defended his fundraiser with Andreessen, arguing that Democrats have become too “pure.” As Rolling Stone reported:
“My general view of how to win elections is you have to get a lot of votes, and that means we’re going to have to have alliances with people that we may not agree with 100 percent of the time,” said Gallego, stating that “Marc Andreessen runs the largest venture capital firm in Arizona. We want to bring as many jobs as possible.”
Gallego said he doesn’t agree with Andreessen on every issue, pointing to the existence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which the VC exec accused of “terrorizing financial institutions” after it fined a payday lending company backed by his firm.
But Gallego added, “My perspective [is] what happened last election is that we got so pure and we kept so pure that we started kicking you out of the tent. It ends up there aren’t enough people in the tent to win elections.”
It’s worth noting that, had Gallego and fellow Democrats effectively protected voting rights — which have been under siege in Arizona and around the country — ahead of last year’s election, they may have already had enough eligible and mobilized voters in their own tent, rather than feeling compelled to pull voters from the MAGA tent. And Democrats featured several Republicans at last summer’s Democratic National Convention, so it’s odd to hear Gallego argue that the party hasn’t been welcoming enough.
Former Democratic pollster Adam Carlson made a valid point about Gallego’s remarks, arguing in a post on X that Democrats should be willing to welcome regretful Trump voters, nonvoters and third-party voters, but maybe shouldn’t be so willing to placate people like Andreessen, who “donated millions of dollars to support Trump & actively advise him on policy antithetical to what we stand for.”
In other words, there’s chemistry at play here, and the question with all impurity is whether it’s toxic or not — whether introducing it into your system will cause harm. Indeed, a few specks of dirt in your drinking water won’t kill you. But arsenic is a different story.
And I think political movements operate similarly. Sure, they can tolerate some opposing viewpoints — as long as those views don't strike at the heart of the very movement you’re trying to mobilize.