Sen. Sinema Will Not Run for Reelection

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced today that she will not be running for reelection. In her statement she focused on a kind of moderate politics that she says is just not what voters are interested in right now. Rather than fight the tide, she has decided to bow out.

Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona said on Tuesday that she would not seek re-election, ending more than a year of speculation about her political future and clearing the race for a traditional matchup between the eventual Democratic and Republican nominees.

“Because I choose civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done, I will leave the Senate at the end of this year,” she said in a video announcement.

Sinema has had a wild ride. She started out as an anti-war activist opposing George W. Bush as a member of the Green party.

When George W. Bush was elected president, Sinema quickly began to make a name for herself in the state with left-wing activism. In the run-up to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Sinema, then a law student at Arizona State University, was a frequent organizer of anti-war rallies, organizing 15 by the start of the Iraq War.

Sinema would later boast on a progressive message board in 2006 of her opposition to Afghanistan from the start and continued opposition, saying she opposed war in all forms.

Her biggest anti-war event was a February 15, 2003, protest in Patriot’s Square Park in Phoenix. Flyers, as first reported by CNN’s KFile, distributed by an anti-war group led by Sinema depicted a US soldier as a menacing skeleton inflicting “U.S. terror” in Iraq and the Middle East.

In 2012 she narrowly won election to a seat in the House as a Democrat and won two subsequent elections in 2014 and 2016 to hold the seat. But by this point she had left her far-left past behind and became one of the most moderate Democrats in the House. In 2017 she announced she would run for Senate. She ran as a moderate and in 2018 she defeated Martha McSally for the seat.

Since then Sinema has repeatedly done things that have really irritated progressives in her party. The left came to truly despise her for holding back their policies and for seeming to enjoy doing it so much. For instance, she famously (or infamously to some) voted down a minimum wage hike by giving it a big thumbs down on the Senate floor.

Senator Sinema having fun voting against a meager minimum wage hike that would benefit workers, businesses and the economy. pic.twitter.com/AbZCiFPFaF

— Tim O’Brien (@TimOBrien) March 5, 2021

Even more enraging to some, she joined up with Sen. Manchin to block and effort to put an end to the filibuster in the Senate. While Sens. Manchin and Sinema took all the heat for that, the fact was that there were other Democrats who opposed the effort, they just didn’t want to become the focus of progressive anger so long as Manchin and Sinema were willing to take it on.

But because she did take it on, Sinema made herself a target of the far left. You may remember a group of protesters even followed her into the bathroom with a camera back in October 2021.

Protesters followed Sen. Sinema into the bathroom at Arizona State University to confront her on Build Back Better and immigration pic.twitter.com/NDSmeu0h2M

— Jennifer Epstein (@jeneps) October 3, 2021

Even after that happened, the Bernie Bros were still vowing to follow her everywhere she went and make her life unpleasant:

“We’re committed to birddogging Kyrsten Sinema with her constituents until the very end,” Our Revolution Executive Director Joseph Geevarghese said in an interview. “What we want to show is that her constituents are very serious about wanting policies and activism and we’re going to make her life unpleasant or uncomfortable until that happens.”

In December of 2022, Sinema had had enough. She announced she was leaving the Democratic party and would become an Independent. She wrote an op-ed at the time explaining her decision:

Arizonans – including many registered as Democrats or Republicans – are eager for leaders who focus on common-sense solutions rather than party doctrine. 

But if the loudest, most extreme voices continue to drive each party toward the fringes – and if party leaders stay more focused on energizing their bases than delivering for all Americans – these kinds of lasting legislative successes will become rarer…

When politicians are more focused on denying the opposition party a victory than they are on improving Americans’ lives, the people who lose are everyday Americans.  

That’s why I have joined the growing numbers of Arizonans who reject party politics by declaring my independence from the broken partisan system in Washington.

Her announcement today sounds like a sequel to that op-ed. Only this time she’s conceding that the loudest, most extreme voices have won. There’s no room left for someone who wants to remain in the middle.

A message for Arizonans from Senator Kyrsten Sinema pic.twitter.com/1XWFSWgGdh

— Kyrsten Sinema (@SenatorSinema) March 5, 2024

So what comes next? The Senate race in Arizona will continue as a two-person race.

Sinema’s decision paves the way for a tough and expensive fight for her seat — though it will be more straightforward than the messy three-way contest she would have prompted by staying in. The leading Republican, 2022 gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake, and the leading Democrat, Rep. Ruben Gallego, are already running hard to replace Sinema.

We’ll have to wait and see how this develops now that the incumbent has dropped out.