Gallego celebrates Senate win, looks ahead to GOP agenda

U.S. Sen.-elect Ruben Gallego promised to fight for all Arizonans — even the ones who didn’t vote for him — in a victory speech that noted his personal climb from poverty to the halls of power in Washington, D.C.
Wearing the Marine Corps cap he often wore on the campaign trail and noting it was Veterans Day, the Iraq War vet acknowledged his own struggles, traced the contours of his own life story and said he wanted others to share in a triumph that should give hope.
“For the veterans out there that suffer from PTSD, for the single moms working two jobs and raising their three kids, the dads who have to miss bedtime because they want to work that extra shift, for the kids sleeping on the floor dreaming about a better, better America and a better, better future, this victory is for you,” he said at American Legion Post 65 in Phoenix. “Thank you, Arizona.”
Gallego spoke late Monday night moments after media outlets projected he would win the race over Republican Kari Lake, whom he didn’t mention in his remarks or wait to see if she would concede his victory.
Lake made immediate no public statement on the result on social media or through her campaign. She never conceded her 2022 gubernatorial loss to Gov. Katie Hobbs.
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Gallego, a five-term Democrat in the House of Representatives, joins a Senate that will flip to Republican control when he arrives.
On Monday, he said he would fight to ensure the Constitution and due process were followed, in an acknowledgement of battles to come with the second Trump administration.
“When it’s time to fight, we will fight the administration,” he said. “And if there’s places where we can find common ground, we’ll find common ground. But we’re going to make sure that we look at it every day from that sense and that point of view because at the end of the day, what is best for the state of Arizona?”
Asked if there were lessons from his success in an election cycle when many Democrats, especially Vice President Kamala Harris did not fare well, Gallego turned to retail politicking.
“What I learned is that you have to earn every vote. This is a swing state. There are 300,000 more registered Republicans than Democrats. I needed to earn support from all Arizonans, and so I went out and talked to everybody,” he said.
A long campaign:Ruben Gallego wins US Senate race, making Arizona history
“I didn’t agree with them all the time. They didn’t agree with me all the time. But we had respectful conversations, and … we walked away sometimes with support and sometimes we didn’t. But I had to make sure that people knew I was out there talking to them and fighting for them, because hopefully at least then we could build some trust.”
From the start of his victory speech, Gallego nodded to the historic nature of his election. He was the first Latino elected to the Senate in Arizona history.
“Growing up poor, being here was something that was literally a dream,” he said.
His mother, Gallego said, “did not have it easy. But she gave us everything she could. She worked night and day, all to give us a shot at the American Dream. Only in America can four children raised by an immigrant single mom grow up to be a teacher, a doctor, a businesswoman and, now, a soon-to-be senator.”
Gallego held to his rhetoric on the legislative filibuster, saying the rule that can stymie majorities in the Senate needs reforms.
It was a key point of disagreement he had with U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., whom he will succeed in the Senate.
That position could be tested when Republicans take power by thin margins in the House and Senate in January and with Trump looking to move swiftly on his agenda.
“I’ve always said that the filibuster should be reformed,” Gallego said. “I do think that it has been a tool of obstruction. It doesn’t change that. Now it’s up to the Republicans in charge to figure out if they want to do that. But at the end of the day, the most important thing is for us to come up with solutions for Arizonans and for the American public.”
The filibuster effectively sets a 60-vote supermajority requirement for passing legislation in the Senate, often leading to gridlock in recent years. 
Sinema has called the filibuster an “important guardrail for the institution.”
In January 2023, Sinema, speaking in Davos, Switzerland, told many of the world’s wealthiest and most influential leaders there was no need to dispense with the legislative filibuster after the 2022 midterms two months earlier.
“Most election deniers lost across the country,” she said then. “And individuals of both political parties — some extreme, some moderate — won. So, we had a free and fair election. So, one could posit that the push by one political party to eliminate an important guardrail and an institution in our country may have been premature or overreaching in order to get the short-term victories they wanted.”
At the same time, Gallego, not long after entering the Senate race, told MSNBC he wanted to change a rule that prevented Democrats from passing voting-rights legislation.
“My position is that the filibuster has to get reformed. It’s not a tool of compromise. It’s a tool of obstruction,” he said then in words he repeated Monday. “​​We pass bills out of the House that die in the Senate. At the end of the day, this is actually really used to stop real moral movement and actual laws actually help people in this country.”
The final margins of Gallego’s win will depend on the official results once all the votes are counted, but by Monday night he was on track to win about 50% of the vote and defeat Lake by 2.2 percentage points.
That would be nearly identical to Sinema’s 2018 win over then-U.S. Rep. Martha McSally, R-Ariz., when Sinema snapped a 30-year drought for Democrats in Senate races and won by 2.3 points.
In 2020, Mark Kelly won by 2.3 points over McSally, who had been appointed to the Senate seat opened after the 2018 death of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz.
Gallego’s seat was the last seat decided on the 2024 Senate map.
Overall, Democrats lost three seats to Republicans — in Ohio, Montana and Pennsylvania. They split two seats held by former Democrats who became independents, one in Arizona and the other in West Virginia.
It means that the GOP will effectively have a 52-48 edge over Democrats and their independent allies in the chamber beginning Jan. 3. Vice president-elect JD Vance will break any ties in the new Senate once he is sworn in on Jan. 20.