WASHINGTON — Yesterday, Senator Ruben Gallego spoke at The Latino Vote Podcast’s Latino Vote Summit, a conversation on the issues, trends, and opportunities shaping Latino political engagement.
See below for excerpts from his remarks:
On evoking patriotism for Latinos: “I think the one thing that also campaigns need to do is like really call towards patriotism for Latinos. We’re a patriotic people. We have so many of our family members that serve in the military, and when we do campaign commercials, obviously we talk about Medicare, security, jobs, but we should also try to evoke patriotism on our campaigns.”
On the human cost of war: “When you go to war, you’re going to war with working-class America, by the way. And if you see who the dead are, it’s boys and girls from Iowa–white, Latino, black. It’s not the Jared Kushners of the world. It is working-class kids that politicians feel okay to take chances with. For me, I have to care, because I was one of those kids. Someone needs to be in that office to actually think about them, or else nobody does. Because nobody did when I first went in 2005. They just rushed me off.”
On building a working-class coalition: “We’ve given up as a party reaching out to working-class white men, and we just hope that we can make up the numbers somewhere else, but it’s a numbers game. At the end of the day, the one thing that I think we should realize now, the big unifier for federal coalition is working-class issues. It’s not all the other things that we thought they were.”
On meeting Latino voters where they are: “There is no national party without Latinos, let’s be clear, and the Democrat party has to understand that. Part of that is that you have to answer to where the Latino voter is, not where you want the Latino voter to be. There has been this want by very liberal organizations, and very liberal donors, and very liberal groups that they want Latinos to be liberal, and the fact is, not all of them are liberal. So, if you need to win the Latino vote, you need to look at the facts that there are moderate and conservative Latinos that are gettable, and if you want to get them, then you have to actually work that vote.”