CONGRESS
Democrats Should Call Sinema’s Bluff
Senate’s newest Independent isn’t popular enough to get re-elected in 2024 without the party
On Friday morning, Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party and would become an independent.
The reason for this was very clear. Philip Klein of the National Review summarized conventional wisdom by saying that Sinema’s party switched reflected “the fact that it would be a challenge for her to win in a Democratic primary.”
In fact, there are multiple political organizations created by Arizonans to support a primary challenge to Sinema in 2024. And, this morning, Holly Otterbein of Politico reported that Rep. Ruben Gallego was interviewing consultants to work on that primary challenge.
Sinema has angered her Democratic base in Arizona by opposing reforms to filibuster rules that would keep the minority party from blocking legislation, opposing voting rights legislation, and not meeting with liberal and progressive groups in Arizona.
The conventional wisdom was that Gallego would defeat Sinema in a Democratic primary in 2024 and today’s move indicates that she agreed with that wisdom.
So, she has adopted a different strategy. By going independent, Sinema is trying to win the Democratic nomination by blackmail, threatening that something worse will happen if people don’t give her what she wants.
What is the something worse that will happen?
The election of a Republican to Sinema’s senate seat. The average Democrat may not like Kyrsten Sinema as Senator, but they certainly like her a lot more in that job than, say, Kari Lake, who recently lost a bid for governor.
Sinema’s move to independent creates that threat because, if she and Gallego (or another Democrat) split the left leaning vote in a swing state, a Republican nominee will win the seat. Instead, Democrats should give Sinema what she wants — the de facto Democratic nomination — and they can do this by standing down in the 2024 race.
But there is a key flaw in Sinema’s strategy. She’s not that popular.
A September 2022 poll for AARP conducted by Fabrizio/Ward and Impact Research found that only 37% of Arizona voters have a favorable impression of Sinema. And unlike most politicians, there were not partisan differences in views of Sinema. Among Democrats, only 37% had a favorable impression of her; it was 36% among Republicans.
She does better with independents — 41% favorable — but she is still underwater — 51% unfavorable.
A model for Sinema might be Alaska Senator Lisa Murkowski, who won re-election in both 2010 and 2022 despite the majority of her party voting against her — in a party primary in 2010 and in a multi-way ranked choice contest in 2022. But Murkowski is broadly popular across all voters in her state. The Fox News Voter Analysis poll of 2022 Alaska voters found that 52% have a favorable impression of Murkowski, which is much larger than the share of Arizonans with favorable views of Sinema.
When third party runs work, they usually feature a candidate who is popular with a broad swath of voters. In addition, they feature voters that are frustrated with their choices from the two parties. There is little evidence of this dynamic existing in Arizona. The Arizona exit polls from 2022 show that only 9% of Republicans voted against their party’s nominees for Senate (Blake Masters) and governor (Lake). Democrats were even more loyal to their party’s nominees. Only 4% voted against Katie Hobbs for governor and only 2% voted against incumbent Senator Mark Kelly.
Party loyalty seems strong among Arizona voters, reducing the ability of Sinema to win re-election as an independent candidate. The Fox News Voter Analysis found that only 13% of Arizona voters are independents who do not lean to one of the two major political parties.
This is a much smaller base than either of the two parties. In addition, the two parties have developed their own ground organizations dedicated to turning out the vote on election day. Sinema will now have to create one on her own.
Also, while Sinema has fundraising advantages as a Senator, those are muted by going independent. Most donors are committed partisans who donate to hep their party win contested seats. Sinema will have to seek a different set of donors than the ones she solicited when she won this seat in 2018.
It seems all but certain that Sinema will finish a distant third in the 2024 Arizona Senate election. And, that leads to the question of whether she will run at all. Campaigns take a lot of time and effort, and that has increased now that Sinema has to create her own organization rather than receive help from her party to do so. In addition, running in an election in which you have no chance of winning is damaging a candidate’s ego and their reputation in political circles.
So, what should Democrats do now that Sinema is trying to blackmail them into giving them their de facto nomination rather than hand the seat to a Republican? They should call Sinema’s bluff with the unstated goal of getting her to drop out of the election. While it’s hard to understand the mind of someone as mercurial as Sinema, if she behaves like most politicians, she will drop out of the race before it gets to the Fall of 2024.
In fact, Sinema would not commit to running for re-election in an interview with Politico about her party switch. She said: “It’s fair to say that I’m not talking about it right now…politics and elections will come later.”
Is this a tell that Sinema will drop out if pressured by the Democrats? Possibly so. Democrats should try to find out.
The party should identify a candidate with broad appeal to the party and the electorate, put broad support behind that candidate, and call the bluff that Sinema signaled today.
