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About a month ago, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema appeared on CBS’s “Face the Nation,” and host Margaret Brennan asked the senator about her re-election plans. The Arizona independent, seemingly indifferent to a rapidly approaching filing deadline, replied that she hasn’t been focused on electoral considerations.
Evidently, she’s had time to think about her future — and that future does not involve a second term. NBC News reported:
Independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced Tuesday that she will not run for re-election this year, leaving the Senate after one term that saw her paint Arizona blue, leave the Democratic Party and play a key role in numerous legislative negotiations in a tightly divided Senate. “I will leave the Senate at the end of this year,” Sinema said in a video posted on her X account.
The outgoing senator, whose plans have been murky for months, elaborated on her perspective in a three-minute, direct-to-camera video released via social media this afternoon.
By any fair measure, Sinema wasn’t left with much of a choice: Recent polling in Arizona showed her struggling badly against Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego and Republican conspiracy theorist Kari Lake. Had she decided to seek a second term, the incumbent faced likely defeat.
Voters in the Grand Canyon State will now have a two-person race instead of a three-person race.
To hear Sinema tell it, she’s stepping down after one term in large part because her work wasn’t as appreciated as it should be.
“[D]espite modernizing our infrastructure, ensuring clean water, delivering good jobs and safer communities, Americans still choose to retreat farther to their partisan corners,” the Arizonan said. “These solutions are considered failures either because they are too much, or not nearly enough. It’s all or nothing. The outcome, less important than beating the other guy.
“The only political victories that matter these days are symbolic, attacking your opponents on cable news or social media. Compromise is a dirty word. We’ve arrived at that crossroad, and we chose anger and division.”
After referencing a series of bills she worked on, Sinema added, “[I]t’s not what America wants right now.”
In other words, the independent senator believes her unpopularity can and should be attributed to misplaced partisanship and an unhealthy political discourse, which prevented voters from appreciating her greatness.
That’s certainly one way of looking at the political landscape — though there is another way.
Sinema began her political trajectory as a Green Party state legislative candidate. She finished fifth — out of five — before becoming a Democrat, moderating her views, and advancing her career.
As we discussed a couple of years ago, Sinema has long recognized her home state as a Republican stronghold — for good reason. Before her own Senate victory in 2018, Arizona had elected a grand total of one Democratic U.S. senator in her lifetime. What’s more, between 1976 and 2016, there were 11 presidential elections, and the GOP ticket carried the Grand Canyon State in 10 of them.
The lesson for the ambitious politician seemed obvious: Sinema wasn’t going to get ahead in Arizona as a progressive. She’d need to appeal to a broader electorate in the Land of Goldwater and McCain.
So, she followed what seemed like a sensible course, keeping her distance from the left, emphasizing bipartisanship, and cultivating a reputation as a relative centrist, even picking up some notable praise from the likes of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
And that might very well have worked for the senator if she’d taken greater care to remember the voters and the values that got her elected in the first place. Instead, Sinema decided to champion ineffective Republican tax breaks that she’d previously opposed. She was needlessly unconstructive on key priorities such as prescription drug costs, which she’d prioritized as a candidate. She pushed genuinely weird arguments in support of filibusters, going so far as to manufacture historical falsehoods.
With Arizona’s recent partisan history in mind, Sinema very likely thought she was doing what she had to do. After all, the theory went, red state Democrats can’t very well govern the same way blue state Democrats do. If she expected to remain effective while maintaining a base of statewide support, she had no choice but to occasionally impress Republicans and their corporate donors. If that meant breaking party ranks from time to time, and frustrating her ostensible allies, it was a price Sinema was willing to pay in order to remain in office in a state where Democrats tend to lose.
But how reliable were those assumptions? Arizona has gradually become bluer during her term, electing Sen. Mark Kelly in 2020, while simultaneously backing President Joe Biden’s ticket. Two years later, Kelly — running as a relatively conventional Democrat, to Sinema’s left — won by an even wider margin than two years earlier.
Simultaneously, other Arizona Democrats — none of whom felt the need to move to the right or abandon their party affiliation — won the state’s gubernatorial race, secretary of state race, and state attorney general race.
Sinema, in other words, went further than she needed to. She could’ve annoyed Democratic leaders and Democratic voters far less, and won re-election anyway.
When assessing how and why the retiring senator’s career went wrong, her flawed instincts matter more than the toxic political climate.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.