The Friday before Election Day, Representative Ruben Gallego invited his supporters to Rancho Ochoa, a rodeo venue in southwestern Phoenix, where they listened to a brass band, cheered as bull riders strained to hold on and watched the dancing horses, a staple of Mexican rodeos.
It was the celebratory culmination of an extensive effort by Mr. Gallego, a Democrat, to target Latino voters as he vied for Arizona’s open Senate seat — an effort that appeared to pay dividends. Even as Latinos, and especially Latino men, shifted drastically away from Democrats this year, and President-elect Donald J. Trump beat Vice President Kamala Harris in Arizona by more than five percentage points, Mr. Gallego won his race by over two points. He seemed to outperform Ms. Harris with Latinos easily.
The shift toward Mr. Trump left Democrats, who have long operated with a belief that demographic change would equal a winning destiny, stunned and scrambling for answers. Some are looking to Mr. Gallego, a plain-talking military veteran and the son of Colombian and Mexican immigrants who has plenty of thoughts on how his party can win back working-class voters and avoid taking the Latino community for granted.
In an interview, Mr. Gallego said the Democratic Party had failed to address the deep-seated anxiety that Latino men felt over rising prices, which left them unable to provide for their families no matter how much harder they worked.
“Latino men feel like their job is to provide security for their family — economic security and physical security,” he said. “And when that is compromised, they start looking around.”
Mr. Gallego devoted significant resources to courting Latino men in a way that many voters and strategists said felt authentic. And he was quicker than many Democrats to embrace tough stances on the migrant crisis and to speak directly to blue-collar workers’ frustrations with high prices, even as traditional economic indicators were positive.
“I know how hard you’re working, where your wages just haven’t kept up with costs,” he said in a television advertisement in April. “And that’s not your fault.”
Democrats and Arizona political strategists suggested that there were lessons the party could take from Mr. Gallego’s campaign, but they cautioned that his victory was partly predicated on elements harder to replicate. Mr. Gallego was running against an especially unpopular Republican, Kari Lake, and he himself is a Latino man with a working-class background. At the same time, he harnessed his Harvard University pedigree and his young family to appeal to suburban white voters.
“You cannot count on his cultural signifiers to win with Latinos,” said Regina Romero, the mayor of Tucson, Ariz. “That is the icing on the cake, but the cake itself has to be built of substance. I believe that as Democrats, we need to double down on working families and fighting for workers.”
Ms. Romero said many of Mr. Gallego’s tactics were also adopted by Ms. Harris, including her emphasis on growing up as the child of immigrants, and pointed out that the candidates whom Mr. Trump and Mr. Gallego defeated have one thing in common: They are women.
As a congressman representing a deep-blue part of Phoenix, Mr. Gallego was known for years as an outspoken progressive, and he and his allies worked from the left to push out Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat turned independent, after she sided with Republicans to block parts of President Biden’s agenda. (She later announced she would not seek re-election.)
Mr. Gallego’s campaign bet that it could better reach both working-class voters — especially Latinos — and highly educated white voters in the suburbs by focusing on a kind of everyman aesthetic that highlighted the candidate’s humble beginnings and blue-collar background.
Mr. Gallego speaks often about being raised alongside his three sisters by his mother in Chicago, working at food stands and construction sites as a teenager to support them, and sometimes sleeping on the family’s living room floor. He attended Harvard and fought in the Iraq war as a Marine, seeing combat in a unit that suffered heavy casualties.
As a Senate candidate, he took steps to make it clear that he understood the Latino community, creating niche groups like Jefas (female bosses) con Gallego and Compas (bros) con Gallego, which courted Latino men.
Ilse Rodriguez, Mr. Gallego’s deputy political director who led his Latino outreach, said she worked to ensure that the campaign’s efforts felt genuine. She vetoed a corrido — a Mexican song that tells a story — that out-of-state artists had created about Mr. Gallego because it felt “more techno, Florida-esque, much more East Coast.” She instead recruited a local band.
Ms. Rodriguez persuaded the campaign’s consultants to green-light a flier that mimicked a lotería card — used in a Mexican game similar to bingo — featuring Mr. Gallego, and she planned events aimed at portraying him as a regular person. He got behind the grill at carne asada events, hung out at an auto shop and delivered breakfast tacos to construction workers during early-morning shifts.
Above all, he indicated that he had heard their economic pain.
Mr. Gallego said Democrats had failed to connect the dots on how esoteric pieces of policy, like the bipartisan infrastructure law, were improving people’s lives.
“Until people actually feel something — higher wages, lower costs, more security — you’re not going to get credit,” he said.
He suggested that Democrats lacked a specific initiative that they could point to as helping people immediately, like the expanded child tax credit that gave monthly payments of up to $300 per child during the coronavirus pandemic but was short-lived. Without something like that to grasp onto, Mr. Gallego said, voters were deciding based on “vibes.”
“If you rely on vibes, you better be vibing better than your opponent,” he said. “And guess what? No one vibes better than freaking Donald Trump.”
Mr. Gallego had a built-in advantage as he bro’d out with Latino men in an effort to win their votes: He actually had the beer-drinking, backslapping macho background to make his actions feel real.
Other candidates “don’t understand that part of the electorate because they’re not a Marine combat veteran who grew up fighting and drinking, literally killing people in another country,” said Chuck Rocha, a veteran Democratic consultant who is friends with Mr. Gallego and advised his campaign. “People try to be Ruben Gallego — not him, per se, but be a man’s man and show ‘I’m tough.’ You can tell they’re faking it.”
That could make it difficult for candidates without Mr. Gallego’s life story and background to replicate his outreach.
Mr. Rocha, though, said it was possible to appeal to blue-collar voters without looking like them or sharing their life experience. Candidates, he said, simply needed to come across as authentic and lean into a message of economic populism.
Mr. Gallego was also quick to react on immigration. In Congress, he was a vocal critic of some of Mr. Trump’s border-security proposals and signed onto a letter asking Mr. Biden’s administration to end Title 42, a pandemic-era law that allowed for easier expulsion of migrants. But he also criticized the administration’s lack of preparedness for the surge of migrants, talked tough on border security and spoke frequently with mayors and sheriffs in Arizona’s border region, leading some to endorse him.
He suggested that politicians without a deep understanding of the Latino community continued to assume falsely that Latino voters who support a pathway to citizenship would not also welcome a crackdown at the border.
“They don’t understand, ‘Wait a minute, how can you want those people deported, but not those people deported?’” Mr. Gallego said. “Well, it’s very simple: We don’t identify with those people that are coming over right now.”
Mr. Gallego has long warned against relying solely on identity politics to win over Latinos. In 2020, he admonished Democrats for using “Latinx,” a gender-neutral term pushed by liberal policymakers but derided by many Latinos, in part because it is difficult to say in Spanish.
He said that he, himself, had successfully employed identity politics in his campaign, with a focus on his background and that he was set to become Arizona’s first Latino senator. But he also consistently hammered his desire to help families by lowering costs.
“You could use identity politics to connect, but you’ve got to deliver an economic message at the end,” Mr. Gallego said. “Right now, there’s these two warring camps, and they’re both wrong. You’re going to have to do both.”
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