The Kyrsten Sinema Party Is Over
Quite the wasted career.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema from Arizona seized the Super Tuesday news cycle and announced that she’s not seeking reelection this year, avoiding a likely humiliating third-place finish in a race against Republican Kari Lake and actual Democrat Ruben Gallego.
The founding member of the Sinema Party released a video Tuesday explaining her one-and-done decision. Apparently, it’s all our fault. She’s not leaving the Senate because she sucks, which is the correct reason, but because we don’t deserve her.
“In 2017, I warned we were approaching a crossroads,” Sinema said. “Our democracy was weakened by government dysfunction and the constant pull to the extreme by both political parties.”
Sinema is describing the first year of the Trump administration, and it wasn’t Democrats who governed as extremists. Donald Trump kicked off the year signing an executive order banning foreign nationals from seven predominately Muslim countries. Sinema’s BFF Mitch McConnell nuked the filibuster for Supreme Court nominees so Republicans could narrowly confirm Neil Gorsuch to the seat they’d stolen from Barack Obama. Republicans passed a trillion-dollar giveaway for rich people on a party-line vote and came damn close to taking health care away from 24 million Americans.
Sinema was elected in 2018, as part of the Blue Wave that was intended to actively resist Trump not enable him. Democrats were thrilled when she defeated Martha McSally, and they tolerated her kooky obstinance for a long while. But she failed to both recognize and live up to this specific moment. It was not the time to pose as a 1990s Jack Kemp Republican.
Sinema, party of one
She droned on: “I promised I would do my best to fix it, to protect and defend the Constitution, to listen to others without judging, to focus on what unites us, and to make Americans’ lives better.”
Well, she failed. She cherished the anti-democratic filibuster, which isn’t mentioned once in the Constitution, over voting rights for Black people and safe, legal abortion access. Her solo act made it hard to unite with anyone, including members of what was once her own party. She kept Democrats at several arms’ length, privately derided Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and mocked President Joe Biden. She publicly told Republican donors in 2022 that the Democratic caucus lunches were “ridiculous.”
“Old dudes are eating Jell-O, everyone is talking about how great they are,” she said. “I don’t really need to be there for that. That’s an hour and a half twice a week that I can get back.”
She rarely listened to her actual constituents, preferring to canoodle with her big-money donors. She refused to meet with state party figures or hold public town halls where voters could ask her questions directly. Her Garbo impression didn’t endear her to Arizonians.
Sinema boasted about how she’d delivered “tangible results that made America safer, stronger, and more prosperous.” Yet, her approval rating in Arizona was consistently abysmal. Madame Web is more popular. However, Sinema is reportedly very smart, with many fancy degrees, so I presume she’s carefully considered voter antipathy toward her and concluded that we’re all wrong.
“Yet, despite modernizing our infrastructure, ensuring clean water, delivering good jobs, and safer communities, Americans still choose to retreat farther to their partisan corners,” she said. “These solutions are considered failures, either because they’re too much or not nearly enough.”
Sinema’s approval plummeted after she became a prominent obstacle to Biden’s domestic agenda. Arizona is a state Biden narrowly won, but she was less willing to work with him and other Democrats than Jon Tester, the senator from Montana, which Biden lost by double digits. It soon became clear that Sinema’s top priority was serving the interests of her billionaire donors. She opposed popular initiatives while taking hardline positions that were extremely unpopular. She fought against tax increases for the wealthy and limits on the carried-interest tax loophole.
I’m admittedly not as brilliant as Sinema thinks she is, but I believe Americans prefer voting rights and reproductive freedom to tax breaks for private equity firms.
“The outcome, less important than beating the other guy,” she continued. “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.”
Sinema was present on January 6, so she should know who specifically has chosen “anger and division.” It’s not Democrats, who just recently compromised with Republicans to avoid a catastrophic debt default and a pointless government shutdown. Her friend Kevin McCarthy lost his gavel because he dared work with Democrats to keep government running.
Finally, after a self-serving series of sentences, she eventually reached her self-serving point: “I believe in my approach, but it’s not what America wants right now.”
That’s true, although she shifts into an outright lie when she claims she chose “civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done.” She froze out her former Democratic colleagues during crucial negotiations and trashed Biden at a closed-door fundraiser, which is hardly “civil.”
She tunelessly sang her own praises for what seemed longer than her actual Senate career, which felt interminable. She can throw herself a parade all she wants, but she’s still quitting after a single term because Arizonians had rejected her.
Girl, we’re not gonna miss you
Bill Scher, politics editor for Washington Monthly, claimed that Sinema’s departure is “a loss for Senate productivity. Much of Biden’s legislative success hinged on her ability to negotiate deals that got to 60.”
Sinema was an anchor on Senate productivity. We know that’s true because Republican leader Mitch McConnell thanked Sinema on Tuesday for saving the filibuster. Biden needed 60 votes to pass anything because Sinema and Joe Manchin kept the Democrat Face Puncher 9000 fully operational. Sinema deserves little credit for legislation that only passed because McConnell personally approved. Her savvy negotiating skills didn’t mean much when MAGA torched the Senate’s recent immigration bill.
Burgess Everett, Politico’s congressional bureau chief, shared this warning on social media: “Driving out an incumbent is a high-risk + (potentially high reward) strategy for left. If Gallego wins, progressives will get an anti-filibuster vote and a more liberal senator from a battleground state. But if Lake is the next senator from Arizona, well, it won't look so smart.”
That’s another absurdly pro-Sinema spin on events. No one forced out Sinema. She torched her career all by herself. Even after Sinema left the party, Schumer didn’t officially endorse Gallego until she announced her retirement. Senate Democrats put her on the powerful Appropriations Committee last year as the late Dianne Feinstein’s replacement.
Sinema was pampered to a ridiculous extent for a first-term senator. Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock defeated Republican incumbents from Georgia, delivering Democrats their narrow Senate majority, yet Sinema was the one whose demands everyone had to meet or she’d walk away. Only people with similar personality disorders would define her tactics as “compromise.”
Yes, the Replace Sinema PAC worked to hold Sinema accountable for blowing off the very voters who helped elect her, but she’s entirely responsible for this historic collapse. She refused to engage meaningfully with her constituents. She probably assumed she could still hold her seat if she bypassed the primary as an independent, but she consistently polled in third place as a sitting incumbent. It’s embarrassing and well-earned.
When NBC news correspondent Julie Tsirkin asked Sinema if she had anything to add to her retirement announcement, one of her staffers just said, “Blah, blah, blah.”
“I also asked if she will endorse in the race now that she has dropped,” Tsirkin added, “and her staffer replied, ‘very funny … hilarious’ and Sinema laughed.”
It’s actually not funny. Kari Lake is a MAGA extremist with zero respect for democracy. If Sinema cared anything about the Senate, “civility,” or constructive governance, she would publicly campaign against Lake, but Sinema didn’t lift a finger to stop her when she was running for governor, either.
If you’ve lost your reason and are tempted to pity Sinema, please keep in mind that she spent her one and only Senate term burning through cash, both from her billionaire donors and normal taxpayers. She stayed at luxury hotels, flew on private jets, and enjoyed fancy dinners at Le Top Drawer. Back in 2021, her reelection campaign dropped $1,180 at a winery in California, which is not Arizona, for “meeting expenses.”
According to the Daily Beast, Sinema’s Leadership PAC, “Getting Stuff Done,” spent $1.7 million in 2023 but only disbursed a paltry $25,000 (or one Sinema-style night in Paris) to other candidates.
As one expert noted: “That’s why leadership PACs supposedly exist, which is to make contributions to other candidates. But she is not making contributions—it’s just like a vehicle for Sinema to hold a fundraiser at a five-star resort with corporate lobbyists, and use the proceeds to fund the next fundraiser at a five-star resort.”
People have suggested that Sinema will cash in as a lobbyist herself. It’s a possibility, but for now let’s just say goodbye to the freshman senior senator: Kyrsten Sinema dreamed a dream of a corporate-friendly bipartisan Senate. She was relatively young and unafraid. And her Senate career was made and used and wasted. There was no ransom to be paid — though she happily accepted corporate PAC money; no song unsung and no wine left untasted.
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Her voting record isn't what sank her--she voted along with her party on most things, and even had (apparently) a hand in some bipartisan deals, which normally would make her popular with Democrats and swing voters. But in kissing off her caucus and her constituents, and running around repeating GOP messaging and the usual claptrap from disengaged pundits about how "Washington is broken" (as if it is not one particular party that broke things), and doing stupid shit like preserving the filibuster and photo opping with McConnell, she made herself unelectable and useless. Fortunately, we won't have to hear from her after this year.
That "blah blah blah" comment and then laughing was a disgusting display by someone who was hired to work for the people of Arizona. Bitch bye! I question whether she would make a good lobbyist since everyone hates her, but I suppose she must have a job lined up or she wouldn't have announced that she won't run again.