The Arizona congressman, who just launched a campaign to take Kyrsten Sinema’s Senate seat, discusses political pragmatism, the lessons of the war on terror, and what’s really happening in Latino communities.

Shortly after the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema publicly changed her political affiliation from Democrat to Independent, Ruben Gallego, a Phoenix-area Democratic congressman, announced that he would challenge her in the 2024 election. Sinema had followed a sui-generis political path: having started out as a rabble-rousing Green Party activist who became the first openly bisexual member of Congress, she ran a moderate campaign for the Senate in 2018 and, after winning, infuriated liberals and Party activists by moving even further to the right. She helped to block a bill that would have cut prescription-drug prices, she voted against raising the minimum wage, and her opposition all but doomed President Biden’s plans for a much more expansive Build Back Better Act, in 2021. (Sinema has not yet announced whether she will run for reëlection; if she and a Democrat are both on the ticket, that might make a Republican more likely to win the seat.) She was at first held up as an example of how progressive outsiders could effectively pressure the political system, and then as an example of why those outsiders could not be trusted. Gallego, a forty-three-year-old fifth-term representative and a key figure in the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, has held more conventional Democratic positions. He has also sometimes baited Sinema. “When I go to D.C., I think about everyone that got me to where I am,” he told “Good Morning America” in January, shortly after announcing his candidacy. “She doesn’t.”

If this election marks a turning point in Sinema’s political career, then it is also critical for Gallego, an outspoken, partisan figure who represents a different generational tendency, in which the dynamic force in the Party is the young members of the establishment, hardened by the Trump experience, growing more combative in their politics and expansive in their demands. Raised in Chicago with three sisters by an immigrant single mother (his estranged father was at one point imprisoned for drug trafficking), Gallego made it to Harvard, where his work-study job entailed cleaning his classmates’ bathrooms. After his grades faltered, and what he called an “enforced ‘pause’ ” on his studies, he enlisted in the Marine Corps and later served as an infantryman in Iraq, where he saw extensive combat as part of a company that went on to suffer some of the highest casualties of any Marine company during the conflict. Returning Stateside, he eventually moved to Arizona with his Harvard girlfriend, Kate Widland, who is now his ex-wife and the mayor of Phoenix. Gallego’s 2021 memoir of his war experience, “They Called Us Lucky,” is an emotional and at times angry book that emphasizes the tenacity of combat trauma in his own life and in the lives of his fellow-soldiers. Gallego is not idealistic about the business of politics, nor about the people within it. After a short interview by phone, Gallego and I met for dinner in Rockefeller Center, on Monday evening, when the media world was consumed by the news that the U.S. military had shot down several unidentified flying objects over North America. We spoke about the Senate race, the impact that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have had on politics, and—most of all—about the generational change under way in the Democratic Party.

Do you have any insight about whether we’re under attack by aliens? I feel like I would be derelict if I didn’t ask—do you know anything we don’t know?

I definitely know stuff you don’t know, because I’m the former chairman of the Intelligence and Special Operations committee. So, yes, yes, I do. I don’t think what’s happening now is aliens—that I deduced recently.

Are these just balloons?

Could be anything. But if we’re using F-22s to shoot it down it’s probably not aliens. Just a hunch.

You gave a quote to Vox a year and a half ago that really stuck with me, because it seemed to give some insight into how you view politics. You said, “Politics is dark and hard. It’s not a bunch of people trying to do their best. It’s who can shank each other in a smarter way.”

Well, I try to be subtle.

Aha.

Many times, politicians focus on this idea of how politics should be but not necessarily on the outcome. That ends up hurting people that need help. Sometimes you have to maybe not work hand in hand with your loyal opposition. Maybe you should focus on making people’s lives better. A lot of people grew up watching “The West Wing” and thinking that politics can be decided by two people who agree. Well, sometimes you should just care about the outcome. People are hurting right now. They need help, and politicians should focus on how to get that done first.

I had thought this had something to do with the 2020 Democratic primaries, and the very idealistic politics that were ascendent then.

No. I’ve always kind of felt this way. I’ve seen the disappointments of my generation. I was born in 1979. I’ve seen two recessions, the towers fall, us getting thrown into an illegal war—and all this time I think there’s been a certain disappointment with the outcomes. I think it’s because politicians aren’t very realistic.

When you say disappointed with the outcomes—

You have generations right now that find themselves in poverty that their parents were never in. You have the lowest amount of homeownership, especially below the age of thirty. You have the highest amount of debt. All these things that our parents grew up with, that we kind of were expecting, are no longer there. But there really hasn’t been any kind of policy decisions to try to help. Until recently.

If this is your perspective on politicians, do you think that the press is not cynical enough?

I don’t think it’s that the press isn’t cynical enough. It’s just that the viewpoints coming from the press, and from policymakers, are very much a product of groupthink. Everyone went to the same colleges. Everyone grew up in the same areas, and I think they all kind of ended up thinking the same way.

I’ll give you a good example. I won’t name this person, but someone I went to college with was shocked after the 2016 election that Donald Trump had won. We went out to dinner, and he was lamenting that he didn’t understand how it went so bad—G.D.P. growth was happening every year. When you have the same amount of money coming into your checking account but you can’t afford to buy anything new, G.D.P. growth doesn’t matter. And he was shocked. He was, like, “Oh, so we should have been worried about people’s personal income growth the whole time?” Like, yes, yes. I don’t think you have to be more cynical. I just think that people have to look outside their bubble to see what’s actually happening.

I think we should be more cynical.

I also do think reporters should be cynical. That should be your standard.

But you did not grow up in that bubble. You grew up in a different environment.

Yeah, I grew up in a different environment, absolutely.

Tell me about that.

I definitely was an interloper in polite society. I was born and raised in Chicago, but lived for a while in Mexico, the son of immigrants. We lived in Mexico, part time, in a city called Chihuahua, and also in the country, where there was a farm that we were working. When we moved back to the states, we moved into working-class Latino and Black neighborhoods on the South Side of Chicago. You know, in some ways, it’s probably the last generation where I got to ride my bike until the lights were on, all that kind of stuff. But there was also gang violence, things of that nature.

This was the late eighties.

Late eighties, early nineties, yeah. I had a cousin who was shot—everyone knew it was my uncle who did it. It was still a pretty decent experience growing up, but it was working class—my father was a construction worker, and I’d go to construction sites with them and work construction. Things eventually, unfortunately, went bad. My father’s company went under. He started selling drugs. Eventually, my father left the picture. He’d pop in every once in a while, but he was no longer a father. And he was an asshole. You don’t think about it at that age, but, when you think about it later, you’re better off, right?

Not a good dude.

No, not a good dude. My mom is hardworking. She was a secretary. She had four kids to raise. She moved into a small apartment just outside Chicago, a community called Evergreen Park. It was a very working-class area, largely Irish and Italians—a lot of people who work in the trade unions and stuff like that. We had a two-bedroom apartment for five people. I was the only male, so I slept on the floor. I went to college. You know, it was a weird situation—we were poor, but we were working. We weren’t spiteful. I don’t think we thought of ourselves as poor. Now we understand that it was not great. I worked throughout high school. I was a janitor. I worked in a meatpacking factory. I was a line-order cook and then went to school, studied, helped raise my sisters. And I had a lot of help from my teachers, my family.

You’ve said that, when Trump ran, you were very worried early on because you’d grown up among his voters, in Evergreen Park, and you were pretty sure he’d have traction.

When I was starting high school, the effects of NAFTA were starting to get felt, and Rush Limbaugh was actually coming through. I was one of the few Latinos in that high school. And definitely a mouthy Latino. I was not going to back off of anybody. I got shit for it. I was called a spic, beaner, everything else you can think of. People would try to start fights with me, and with my sisters, too. A lot of what I was hearing was definitely things that their parents were saying, right? And where were the parents getting it? It doesn’t excuse the kids for being little shithead racists. It is what it is. But you can tell that there was frustration at that point—it was a Democratic area—about people losing their jobs.

And you don’t think this was just about elemental racism? You think it was specifically about NAFTA?

Oh, there’s elemental racism in everything. But there’s degrees to it. And I think the stress of this shit that was happening in these households was probably on top of that. When Trump came along, years later, I was worried right away. I think a lot of people were saying, “No, no, no, he couldn’t win.” I’m, like, “There’s a big segment of the population who’ve been waiting for someone to say this to them and make them feel good about these thoughts that they’ve been having.” And unfortunately I was right.

You left Evergreen Park to go to Harvard.

You know, I got into this great school, but to this day I’m not really a Harvardian. Like, I went to school there, but I never really fit in.

I think you were there at the same time as Pete Buttigieg and Elise Stefanik.

Yeah, I knew both of them because—this is a weird situation—they were in this group called the I.O.P., the Institute of Politics. I used to go bartend at their events. They have a speaker series and stuff like that. We’d get paid to go bartend or serve food. But, yeah, I knew of them. They were campus celebrities already.

Did it feel as though you were in a whole different world from them?

I never thought about it. I mean, I was just happy I was getting nine bucks an hour. And whenever there was some old dude who came by and said, “Oh, chap,” or something like that, I was, like, This dude’s going to tip me well at the end of the night. I was in this thing called Dorm Crew, where you clean the student bathrooms. It wasn’t until later on that I realized it was actually kind of fucked up—clean the kid’s bathroom, and then see him the next day. When you’re in it, it’s just a work-study job.

You went to Iraq as a marine, in 2005. You’d been working in politics a bit.

Yeah, right. I had just gotten off the 2004 election.

Did you have a political career in mind at that point?

No, I always wanted to work for the C.I.A. or the State Department. I thought it was really cool. I used to love that shit. And I even did an internship at the State Department, just after 9/11, so, probably the summer of 2002. Colin Powell was in charge. I was in the Western Hemisphere department. I loved everything about it. Even took the Foreign Service exam that summer and went pretty far in it. I passed the orals and then didn’t pass the next level. But, yeah, that was a goal. I wanted to be a diplomat. The military—being in the Marines is mostly something that I wanted to do for me. I should have been smarter, in retrospect. But I thought it would be very helpful for going into the F.B.I., the C.I.A., or the State Department.

Before you went to Iraq, in the aftermath of 9/11, did you feel that the U.S. was in an emergency?

Prior to the Iraq War, I actually thought it was a war of emergency. I really thought, at some level—and in retrospect I was wrong—that we were at an existential point in this country. I was already in the military [as a reservist]. I didn’t join because of 9/11, but I hoped that they were going to activate me to go to Afghanistan. Partly I wanted to serve, partly I wanted revenge. People died. In a weird way, for a lot of us younger Latino men, it was our generational fight—kind of a way to be part of the grander American story. And, unfortunately, we ended up in Iraq, and it’s a whole different story. I still feel that Latinos aren’t part of the story of the last twenty years of war, even though a lot of us were in that war.

What do you mean by “aren’t part of the story”?

When you see any movies about the Iraq War, you don’t see, you know, Javier Ramos running around, right? There were a lot of us over there. I mean, we had so many Latinos that we’d speak Spanish to each other on patrol.

You’ve written a whole book about what happened in Iraq and its aftermath, so we don’t need to get into a ton of detail—

I can’t afford more therapy.

But, toward the end of this book, you have a scene where you duck out of an event where Dick Cheney is going to speak because you’re furious about the whole situation.

Yeah. I mean, we were getting fucking killed because these guys didn’t get us enough armor, didn’t get us enough manpower, and just basically left us out there to die.

Knowing what you now know about politics, why did they?

The more I’ve been in this, the more I’ve realized that it was a combination of things: acceptance that people are just going to die; laziness, that they just didn’t want to break through bureaucracy to get us the weapons that we needed; ego, because some of these officers wanted their ribbons and their medals, and we were the fodder; and a lot of wish-casting about what was happening in Iraq.

A lot of us were very heroic at the time, in an awful situation. We were put in an unjust war by our leadership—by our bosses, by our politicians. And, when we returned, people still didn’t want to deal with the fallout of what happened, and kind of wanted to just ignore it for years. One of the things I really wanted to do with my book is not sugarcoat it, because war is dirty, and the aftermath carries on, you know, forever. I’m going to have P.T.S.D. for the rest of my life. A lot of my friends have other diseases, and one too many have killed themselves.

Will there be any effect on policy—fewer wars, for example—if these experiences are properly digested?

You know, I wasn’t born yet, but I think the same thing was said after the Vietnam War, that we wouldn’t find ourselves in foreign engagements. And of course that wasn’t true. I hope people will learn the lessons of the endless war, about military power and what it can do, but I’m afraid that won’t be the case. Until people really feel what happens in war, it’s always going to be easy to ship those kids off to war. It’s the same families and communities that are committing their kids to the military. It’s not really the full society.

Early in the 2016 primaries, I saw Jeb Bush do a veterans’ event in New Hampshire, where he was trying to make a play for the veteran vote, as the brother of the former Commander-in-Chief. There were all these guys at the back of the room, some of them in wheelchairs, many with a kind of broken-seeming look, who were veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and were just not having any part of it. That always stuck with me, and I’ve wondered how much that experience of war had to do with the rise of Trump and populism.

The connection between veterans and Trump is more about his populist appeal. I mean, a lot of them were also very pro-Bernie, right? You sometimes hear from people that Trump is the antiwar guy, but he has nearly gone to war with North Korea a couple of times. He gave the Saudis weapons that are killing innocent children in Yemen.

One thing that was appealing to veterans was that they felt Trump spoke with no bullshit, and they were just sick of the same politicians over and over again. That same group may have cost him the election [in 2020] because they felt that he was a danger to the country and they didn’t vote for him as much as they did in 2016.

Are we still in the Trump emergency, or do you feel like we’re out of it?

You have Trump and you have Trump copycats. Until we actually fully defeat election denialism, I don’t think we can just let it go. There are offshoots of it—dangerous people, such as Michael Flynn, who have this ethno-nationalist religious movement that’s very scary, and that’s not even being paid attention to right now.

Let’s talk a little bit about that. After returning from Iraq, you eventually moved to Arizona, started working in politics, and, by 2011, you were the vice-chair of the Arizona Democratic Party. The next year, you were in the state legislature. The major figures in the Arizona G.O.P. were still John McCain and Jeff Flake, but there were all these other Republicans around who are now part of the national conversation. A big one is Kari Lake, who was then a newscaster, and who eventually became an election denier and was one of the Trumpiest figures in the country in this last cycle, when she narrowly lost a race for governor of Arizona. What did you see of the Republican Party in Arizona then, and how was it transitioning?

I was seeing two things happening at the same time. You had a Republican Party that was trying to be the McCain wing of the Party. And then you had the one being led by people like Russell Pearce and Sheriff Joe Arpaio. That was building, but you felt it all the time. There were people in my American Legion who were in shopping malls where people would come up to them and say, “Go back to your fucking country”—to people who have lived here for generations. As a Latino, I would get it all the time: “Go back to your country. You’re a traitor. You’re a spic.”And that was coming as the Republican Party was getting crazier and crazier. The Republican Party wouldn’t use words like “spic” or anything like that, but they would certainly amp up some of the illegal-immigration rhetoric that was kind of throwing a blanket across all of us.

And that was the time of S.B. 1070. [The law originally required police to determine the immigration status of anyone they stopped whom they suspected of being in the country illegally.]

Yeah. S.B. 1070 really was a wake-up call to Arizona and to Latinos in Arizona, because it’s one time when everyone felt targeted. It’s one time that everyone thought, like, Oh, it doesn’t matter if you are well-to-do—you’re brown, you’re going to be targeted. That’s the one thing that unified a lot of the community to finally get together and start pushing back.

How much responsibility do Republicans such as Flake and McCain bear for this?

It’s not that they’re weak. What the Republicans don’t want to tell you is that people with these views were always there, because they needed them. And, instead of trying to say, “No, that’s not the kind of party we are,” they try to keep them as the base. They ran commercials that are somewhat inflammatory. Maybe they did their best, but there was nobody in the Republican Party who was entirely denouncing the really xenophobic, right-wing tilt that was taking over at that point. They were always trying to figure out how to calm it, how to tame it, but it was always part of the base of the Party that they needed to have.

This is maybe an example of a theme of yours: that politics is about sticking the shank in.

It was a failure of collective action. A lot of Republican leadership wanted this not to happen. But they just wanted someone else to do it for them. Much like Trump in 2016—nobody wanted Trump to happen, but nobody wanted to do anything about it. Even now. In some sense, they’re, like, Well, someone will do it, and I’ll just keep reaping the benefits. In reality, they could have done it, but it would have required all of them to take a leap together. And I think a lot of them were afraid to do it because a lot of them started going down, started losing elections and primaries. And then a lot of them kind of rationalized that they got to live to fight another day.

One of the big themes coming out of the 2020 election was that Democrats were going to have a problem with Latino voters in the future, concentrated especially among Latino men without college degrees. How do you read the evidence of the 2022 election both in Arizona and nationally? How worried do you think the Democratic Party should be about the Latino vote?

In 2022, we stabilized, except in Florida. And, as I tell my friends, Florida is always going to Florida us—and that’s across the board, right? We stabilized because Democrats actually spoke to Latinos early and often. And we spoke to them about things that matter to them. For me, talking about the American Dream matters to Latinos. They want to have steady jobs; they want to have a bright future for the kids. They want to believe that if they work hard, play well, and study hard, they’re going to have that American Dream. In 2022, we were having that conversation more often, about how the Democratic Party is that party. That’s why we were able to recover a lot of that.

The other thing that really matters, and people don’t talk about it, is that January 6th and election denialism drove a lot of conservative male Latino voters back to the Democrats. Latino males, and especially older Latino males, are very patriotic. They love this country. They love the Constitution, and enjoy everything that comes with it.

How did January 6th change the Democratic Party?

I think there’s just a lot more understanding of the danger of letting certain elements of fascism go unchecked. A lot of people thought, you know, maybe it’s just Trump, and other people keep him in check. We were wrong. But it wasn’t just Trump that got us to January 6th. It was all these lawyers with Ivy League degrees and people who have been in government forever, who let this kind of build to the point that we could have had a real disaster on our hands. It has made us more attentive and aggressive. It also gave us the opportunity to reframe what patriotism is. I think patriotism in the past has had a lot to do with honoring the military. A lot of people now understand that patriotism has to do with honoring the Constitution, protecting our institutional democracy.

When I was running for office all those years before January 6th, rarely did people ever talk about the institution of democracy. I think this is a newfound passion. It’s a newfound passion for me. I still can’t believe how close I came to getting killed by an insurrection. It makes me more aggressive. If someone like Kari Lake is my opponent, I’m going to take her down. Not because I don’t think she’s a good person. I think she’s a real threat to democracy. I think she will do anything she can to overthrow elections for her own political game. I think there are a lot of people who would gladly join her, and I think that is a reason why we have to have people running, not just for policy goals but for pure protection of democracy.

There was a big fuss a year or two ago when you said that your office would not be using the term “Latinx” in its official communications. You went on a little Twitter rant about it. And I remember at the time kind of rolling my eyes and thinking, Here goes Gallego grandstanding a bit here, and now he’s going to go on Bill Maher—

Got me on that one!

—and it feels like he’s trying to build a kind of anti-woke brand. Because you could have simply used the words “Hispanic” and “Latino” in your office’s communications and not made such a big deal about it. Why did you make a big deal about it?

I felt that we needed to communicate to the people who were iffy on this that it’s O.K. to not use a term like that. As the chair of the Committee for Hispanic Causes PAC, we see data. We see what’s really happening in the Latino community. There was this very weird feedback loop that was happening where people were afraid to say it, to say, “Hey, ‘Latinx’ is not the most appropriate term to use all the time.” It was important to just start the conversation, because it wasn’t going to be done by, honestly, a white consultant. It wasn’t going to be done by another activist group that was feeling the same way. And so I had a position from which it was safe to say it. I was not going to get voted out for saying it. A lot of us Latinos in Congress have a certain amount of authority to do this that a lot of other people just don’t.

The thing you’re signalling here is to not let the academic, activist language govern how you try to communicate with ordinary people?

Absolutely, yeah. And we did see some campaigns that sent out literature to Latino or Hispanic voters that referred to Latinx voters. That’s a very risky move, considering how few people identify with that word.

Arizona only recently became a state that elects Democrats to statewide office. But the Democrats it elects are, in many cases, people without deep roots there. Mark Kelly and Kyrsten Sinema came to Arizona from other places. You moved to Arizona as an adult.

There wasn’t that barrier. There are more people in Arizona who moved to Arizona after 1990 than who lived in Arizona before 1990. That tells you something about the movement of people in Arizona. And because the Arizona Democratic Party was very bare-bones, there wasn’t a hierarchy we had to fight.

One of the people who didn’t have to fight that hierarchy is Senator Sinema, who you are now running against. I’m sure you watched her campaign in 2018 closely.

I volunteered. I donated, I knocked on doors for her. . . . We had met early on, when I worked on a campaign that she was the chairwoman of.

You were both operatives.

Yeah. And we were in the State House together. She was an effective legislator who I think at that point was in it for the right reasons. She ran for Congress, and a lot of us were happy that she won and were rooting for her. But you could sense that there were some things that were kind of off during the campaign. There was a group that got together to recall Russell Pearce, who was the head of the S.B. 1070 movement [and the president of the State Senate]. They called us and asked us to support the recall, and I said of course I would do it, I would raise money for the recall. I got some calls from some very big donors who were, like, “How can you do this? Russell’s the president. He’s not that bad.” Like, he is bad. Sorry. He literally tried to take away birthright citizenship in Arizona. You don’t get any worse than that. When Kyrsten was asked if she was going to support the recall, she absolutely said no. She said, “I have to work with this guy.” That was in 2012. In 2016, she refused to endorse Hillary—didn’t campaign for her, didn’t show up at anything. That was troubling for me.

What’s your theory about what happened with Sinema?

She didn’t learn. When you grow up poor, every day is a grind. For me, the walk to school was the biggest thing in my life. It was cold. It was rainy. And then I had to figure out how to get back, and how to do the work, and all this kind of shit, right? And now you multiply that by three hundred and sixty-five days, and by however many years. The whole time you’re just, like, How the fuck am I gonna get out of this? That’s all you’re really obsessing about. What are my little lights that I can focus on?

A lot of it is about who’s helping you out. My computer wasn’t up to snuff for my college applications, so the Kobelt family, a really nice family in Evergreen Park, would let me use their computer. You need that kind of stuff. I had a librarian, Linda, who would let me stay after school and practice exams. And so it’s weird to see somebody who I think went through the same thing just be, like, I’m not going to worry about these people anymore. I’m going to worry about these people who are already doing well, and already have power. It’s as if she literally forgot the lessons of being poor.

You’ve said that you considered challenging Mark Kelly when he ran for Senate, in 2020.

If I ran against Kelly it would have been a losing campaign. We did our polling, and, honestly, we were ten points down before we started, which is . . . manageable. But it was going to be a two-year race for a two-year term, and then you’d have to run again. It was going to have to be running to his left and going negative where you can—I was going to spend so much time away from my baby son attacking someone else, who I think at his core is a good man who would end up doing the right things. It didn’t make sense. It was hard because he didn’t have any positions at that point. He was an astronaut. It’s great to have a great American story, but try running against a fucking astronaut. I mean, that’s hard.

Sinema’s got an eighty-two-per-cent rating from the A.F.L.-C.I.O. And I think she’s someone most progressives would trust on social issues—she’s been a leader on reproductive and L.G.B.T. rights. The place where they might have the most doubt is on economic issues. But, even there, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. says she goes four-fifths of the way toward where they’d like her to go. That’s not terrible. Why is it so important to run against this person, when you might risk splitting the vote and throwing it to Republicans?

When push came to shove, was she going to make the right decisions? She didn’t. I was on the floor on January 6th. It was not a great situation. The country was under threat. We need to have some legal way to stop these courtroom insurrections that are going to happen, and she’s there upholding the filibuster of the John Lewis voting-rights act, of a person who she claimed was her friend and mentor. When she was needed, when we needed courage from her, she did not show courage. This is a tough job. You’re spending all this time away from family, all this kind of stuff. Why do all this if, at the end of the day, you’re not really moving the ball forward? Not really making people better? That’s what she represented to me.

At an earlier point, I asked you if we were still in the Trump emergency, and you said, basically, yes.

Right.

That sounds to me like part of what you are saying here.

I don’t really think you need to be a lockdown Democratic voter. I don’t think the problem is that she didn’t stay with the Party. It’s that she didn’t stay true to Arizona. Nobody sent her over there to negotiate for pharmaceutical companies. She did that. No one sent her to negotiate for hedge-fund managers and private equity. She did that on her own. Where was this pressure coming from? And then she didn’t even bother to tell us why she did it. She doesn’t have town halls. Well before me, people were mad about it. Because, at some level, she had broken the social contract she had created with these voters.

When I talk to folks about this race, what I hear, generally, is that “Gallego is trying to get her out of the race, because, if she stays in, and you have two people elected as Democrats and one as a Republican, you’d bet on the Republican.”

People need to make their own estimations about whether it’s worth it. If we run a really, really good race, she and other people are going to have to make calculations. If she stays in, she’s not going to be a senator. And I’m going to. If she leaves, I’m going to be a senator.

The Democrats have been outwardly very cordial about Sinema leaving the Party. They’ve allowed her to keep her committee posts; they’ve said accommodating things about her. Do you think that suggests that they’re going to avoid intervening in this race?

Look, elected officials are just passive-aggressive by nature. They’re not going to confront somebody they don’t have to, and so they put off making hard decisions. Right now, it’s so early in the race that they don’t have to make a decision. [The Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee] is not going to do anything in this race for a while. Why put yourself in a weird situation with someone you’re going to need to sit next to for the next two years when you can just put off the decision, right? I wish it were deeper than that. But there is no Machiavellian move. It’s just a passive-aggressive standoff.