Kyrsten Sinema Ditching the Democrats Doesn’t Mean the Party Is Done With Her

Two days after Raphael Warnock won reelection, and fresh off a historic midterm where Democrats turned a red wave into a small red algae patch of a few stray congressional seats, Kyrsten Sinema declared she didn’t want to be part of that narrative. Arizona may have elected Democrats up and down the ballot in November, but Sinema wasn’t going to follow the path of Mark Kelly, who will be spending another six years in the Senate after beating a Donald Trump–backed Republican challenger. Instead, Sinema’s banking on the misguided and slightly hilarious notion that what the people of Arizona really want is another Joe Lieberman. 

You’ll remember Lieberman as the pro-Iraq war Connecticut senator who, after losing a Democratic primary, somehow managed to be reelected as an independent in a blue state despite being widely despised by liberals. It’s quite a twist for Sinema, who, during her activist days, once protested at a Lieberman visit to Arizona. “He’s a shame to Democrats,” Sinema reportedly said at the time, adding, “He seems to want to get Republicans voting for him—what kind of strategy is that?”

Fast-forward to Friday, when Sinema unveiled her plans to bolt the Democratic Party, telling Politico that she “never really fit into a box of any political party.” Or maybe there’s just no lane in the Democratic Party for senators who fight against the president from their own party and who favor tax-cut loopholes for millionaires and who seem more interested in delighting the dark money group No Labels than acting in the interests of her own constituents. Even as she grabbed headlines with her announcement, Sinema seemed to downplay what it all meant. “I don’t anticipate that anything will change about the Senate structure,” she said. 

Though others, like Senator Bernie Sanders, who has run as an independent in Vermont while caucusing for the Democrats, would be the first to draw a distinction between himself and Sinema. “She has her reasons. I happen to suspect that it’s probably a lot to do with politics back in Arizona,” Sanders told CNN on Sunday of Sinema’s move. “I think the Democrats are not all that enthusiastic about somebody who helps sabotage some of the most important legislation that protects the interests of working families and voting rights.”

In Sinema’s platitude-ladened opinion piece announcing her new party alignment, she bemoaned “rigid partisanship” and bragged that her “approach is rare in Washington and has upset partisans in both parties.” But actually Republicans were delighted with the move. Republican senator Tom Cotton told the polymaths on the curvy couch at Fox & Friends, “I’ve told her over the last few years that if she wanted to dip a toe into the Republican Party’s pool we’d be happy to have her jump in with us as well.” What LGBTQ+ congresswoman wouldn’t want to join the party that birthed the “don’t say gay” legislation and spent the midterms bullying trans kids? Just because Sinema is against helping working people doesn’t mean there’s a place for her in the Republican Party.  

The idea that somehow both parties are toxic is the falsest of false equivalencies. Sinema has the kind of bothsidesing brain worms that are rarely seen outside of the worst hot takes of the pundit class. The Republican Party has been so profoundly anti-legislation and pro-culture wars they declined to even have a party platform in the 2020 election, and spent the midterms fearmongering about crime, demonstrating fealty to Trump, and obsessing over Hunter Biden’s laptop. (Get ready for two more years of the latter under a GOP House majority!) Yeah, the two parties are not remotely the same, and partisanship isn’t the primary problem with American politics: Republican extremism is. 

Sinema’s both-sides framing sounds more like a cynical ploy to try and avoid a Democratic primary she surely knows she’ll lose. Her thumbs-down stunt in voting against raising the federal minimum wage wasn’t the kind of thing that Democratic primary voters like. And then there’s Biden’s “Build Back Better” agenda, which was seriously neutered by the work of Sinema (and Joe Manchin). If anything, Sinema’s move is proof that the Democratic base will no longer tolerate senators who tweet about the importance of raising the federal minimum wage and then, as Ilhan Omar tweeted at the time, “gleefully” vote against it. There is no place in today’s Democratic Party for fake Democrats who stand in the way of progressive legislation in the hopes of maintaining tax cuts for the rich. 

The likely winner of a Democratic primary is already waiting in the wings. As Arizona congressman Ruben Gallego told me, “Kyrsten Sinema’s values are not Arizona’s values. She consistently puts Wall Street above working families, and her decision to abandon the Democratic Party is disappointing but not surprising. It also doesn’t change my thinking, and like a good Marine, I’m making necessary plans for if we decide to run.”

It’s clear Sinema sees the writing on the wall. The question is, will she try to run as an independent and risk playing spoiler in 2024, potentially siphoning off enough votes from a Democratic candidate to pave the way for, say, Kari Lake or Blake Masters. With Democrats already facing a “brutal” electoral map in two years, let’s hope Sinema decamps before then to a fat lobbying gig on K Street.