Hello and welcome to the Bullard podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. We've got a double-dose today. Up in segment two, it's my girls are Lena Maxwell. But first, he's a U.S. Senator representing Arizona. He was previously a U.S. Congressman. He's deployed to Iraq in

2005 as a Marine Infantryman. His name is Senator Ruben Gallego. How you doing, Senator?

Hey, good morning. Good to see you. We were talking a bit in the green room about my friend Carrie Lake.

You defeated her in the election in 2024. Somal, yeah. Yeah, bad news for the voice of America, maybe good news for the Senate.

I wanted to ask you about that, your point about solidly, because there were several

Democrats that won in states where Trump won.

But if you look at the data, it was mostly because those people like voted for Trump

and then went home.

They're Trump

only voters. Your state was the one example that was different. You had about 100,000 more votes

than Kamala Harris. And so I do think that your case is kind of an interesting one to study.

So I'm wondering if you've reflected it on that. If you have any theories of the case, was it

something about you, something about Kerry, something about Arizona? It was a combination of a lot of things. Like, look, we ran a very

retail-oriented campaign to begin with. Like, we literally were going to baseball games,

putting together boxing watch parties, rodeos, reaching out to Latino men, talking, you know,

to everyone, talking to Republicans, going to rural Arizona.

I also think we actually were talking about Arizona and the politics of Arizona, but what was

happening there in a realistic manner. We were talking about the cost of everything going up and how we

need to fix that. And that is a problem. And I think that was something that a lot of Arizona's appreciated because I think they were hearing from some campaigns like, no, things

are good. I'm like, no, they're not. But we were also very serious about the border. And we talked

about the border in a very serious Arizona way, right, where we want more border patrol.

We want, you know, bad people to get deported. We want immigration reform. We want to protect

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