Before the fight began, Rep. Ruben Gallego was testing his form against a boxing dummy for an audience on TikTok. Nearby, aspects of his biography (“El Marine”) and attacks on Kari Lake, his opponent in Arizona’s Senate race (“La Mentirosa” — the liar) were rendered in the form of colorful loteria cards — a Mexican answer to Bingo — scattered on folding tables in the corner of a massive strip mall parking lot.
It was a Saturday night in the heavily Hispanic Phoenix suburb of Glendale, Arizona. A mostly male crowd sat on plastic chairs and coolers facing two large screens, eating tacos and and listening to a mariachi band as they awaited the start of a prize fight featuring the Mexican middleweight boxer Canelo Álvarez. Gallego’s “Fighting for Arizona” signs covered the windows of the boxing academy hosting the event, but there was not much else to signal this was a campaign event.
Gallego, who’s represented this area in Congress for a decade, argued to me that many of the men who showed up at an event like this are unlikely to absorb political information through traditional channels. Instead, they get much of their news filtered through messengers hostile to the Democratic Party: their co-workers, and often, their bosses. “Who do you think working-class Latino men work for?” he asked. “Working-class white men are Republican, and they’re hyper-political.” Gallego is trying to counter this lunchbox politicking from the other side — putting on a non-political event where his brand of Democratic politics can seep through. His campaign picked up the tab for the tacos. But he did not make a speech. “It’s a very soft sell,” he told me. “If you speak, they’re going to get turned off. They’re not going to listen.”…