Rep. Ruben Gallego's Senate run has rarely highlighted his support for President Joe Biden

When President Joe Biden visited the Grand Canyon last summer, Rep. Ruben Gallego shook his hand after stepping off Air Force One.

In 2020, Gallego, D-Ariz., backed Biden over the more liberal Sen. Bernie Sanders when the Vermont socialist was still in the Democratic presidential primary.

And Gallego hasn’t stopped criticizing the leading Republican alternative: former President Donald Trump.

But so far this year Gallego, the only prominent Democrat in Arizona’s U.S. Senate race, has offered only tepid support for Biden.

It comes as Biden’s approval numbers are abysmal across the country and he is consistently behind in polling in Arizona, one of the few presidential battleground states.

Thursday’s report from the special counsel investigating classified records Biden personally kept after leaving the vice presidency brought to the fore another political millstone for the 81-year-old president: his age.

Gallego offered no public reaction to the report, which described Biden as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.” The report drew an angry response from Biden and some Democrats.

A Gallego campaign spokesperson declined to comment about the matter Friday.

Gallego’s approach to the leader of his party is notable for its contrast with Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, who is a surrogate for Donald Trump’s latest presidential campaign. She seemingly professes her support for him and his priorities every day on the stump, on TV and on social media.

Lake, the front-runner for the Republican nomination in the Senate race, has noticed the relative distance between Gallego and Biden.

Her campaign repeatedly has asked why Gallego hasn’t declared his support for Biden and noted the special counsel’s findings as another way to highlight her effort to link Biden to Gallego and Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, I-Ariz., whose seat she is seeking.

“Ruben Gallego and Kyrsten Sinema have spent over three years enabling a man who is clearly unfit for office according to Biden’s (Department of Justice),” she said in a written statement to The Arizona Republic. “They have rubber stamped his open border that made Arizona less safe and reckless spending that caused high inflation. Arizonans will remember come November.”

As a member of Congress, Gallego has reliably voted for Biden’s legislative agenda, and he was active in promoting Biden in Arizona during the 2020 election.

Gallego has mentioned Biden on his usual social media platform just five times since May. In each case, it was to say what he wanted policy-wise from the administration.

He has used it to gently criticize Biden, too.

In an August 2022 social media post after the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan, Gallego responded to someone else and wrote, “On Biden I think he is doing a good job. Especially recently. I think Afghanistan could have been handled better but think his Ukraine policy has been great wish there was more urgency early on though.”

By comparison, Gallego has invoked Trump at least 23 times on social media since May. He usually includes a reference to Lake, saying she is no different than Trump.

At the Grand Canyon event, Gallego met Biden stepping off Air Force One, but skipped Biden’s dedication of a new federal monument, citing family commitments.

“I wanted to meet (Biden) at the Grand Canyon when he’s making that great announcement, but it’s also my son’s first day in first grade,” Gallego told reporters at the time. Sinema, who quit the party months earlier, stood at Biden’s side as he formalized the monument.

Gallego said he pressed the case for relief measures from extreme heat when chatting with Biden. At the time, Phoenix had just snapped a record-shattering 31 straight days of reaching at least 110 degrees.

In some ways, Gallego is following a similar pattern by Sinema and Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Ariz., both of whom often pronounced their independence even as they ran as Democrats and won three times since 2018. Sinema left the Democratic Party in December 2022 and hasn’t publicly said whether she will seek a second term.

But Gallego’s relative distance from Biden is surprising for someone who had actively helped campaign for him in 2020.

When asked last week on Channel 3’s “Politics Unplugged” whether he plans to endorse Biden, Gallego gave a measured answer.

“Look, I’m a Democrat,” Gallego said. “You know, we’re going to make sure we get out the vote, and at the end of the day, when I win the Democratic nomination, I will be with our Democratic nominee, and that’s going to be Joe Biden.”

Asked recently by Axios whether Gallego supports Biden, a Gallego spokesperson replied, “Yes.”

This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Does Ruben Gallego support Joe Biden? He rarely says so in Senate race