It was Monday, October 14, the former Christopher Columbus holiday renamed Indigenous Peoples Day. Ruben Gallego, 44, a Democratic candidate for Senate, put on his hiking shoes before dawn and hit the road to meet voters. The road or rather the path: the one that winds along the cliffs of the Grand Canyon, the grandiose geological formation carved out by the Colorado River in Arizona.
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Objective: the village of Supai, a good four hours walk and 13 kilometers below. This is where the Havasupai tribe lives, isolated from the rest of the world, whose name translates as “people of the blue-green water”in reference to its translucent waterfalls. It was of course a campaign event – the candidate, his team and a procession of journalists returned by helicopter – but Ruben Gallego was celebrated by the Havasupai. On behalf of the 160 voters, tribal council member Juanita Wescogame told him about the uranium mine that operates on the tribe's doorstep. The natives fear that their water will be contaminated.
Ruben Gallego, elected to the House of Representatives since 2015, was fulfilling a campaign promise: to visit all of Arizona's indigenous tribes. There are twenty-two of them, from the Navajos in the north, who have the largest reservation in the country, to the Apaches in the east, engaged in a fierce fight against the copper mines at Oak Flat, to the Indians of Gila River, around Phoenix , rich thanks to their casinos and their ancestral right to water, or to the Tohono O'odham, on the Mexican border, who led the fight against Trump's wall.
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The stubbornness paid off. A week after the November 5 election, Ruben Gallego was declared the winner of the Arizona senatorial race, the last still uncertain race in the competition for control of the upper house, on Monday November 11. After this result, the Republicans held 53 seats and the Democrats 47. While the polls put him in the lead – sometimes with a lead of up to 5 points – Gallego was only ahead of his rival Kari Lake by some 73,000 votes (on more than of 3 million). But he did better than Kamala Harris, who lost the state conquered, certainly by less than 11,000 votes, by Joe Biden in 2020.
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Ruben Gallego was running for the seat of Kyrsten Sinema, a former environmentalist, now a Democrat, elected in 2018 to the seat of John McCain, the Republican candidate for the White House in 2008. In the Senate, she had irritated the Democratic base by doing several times the Republican game. Disavowed by the party, she renounced an independent candidacy in March.
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