In the U.S. Senate, the short-term consequences of Kyrsten Sinema’s showy decision to leave the Democratic Party are much smaller than they might first appear. The real repercussions won’t be felt for two years — in her state and in her former party.
The Arizona senator says she won’t caucus with Republicans, meaning she will operate as a de facto member of the Democrats’ 51-seat majority and ensuring the party has firm control over committees. In terms of her actual voting, formally leaving the party is a sign that her vote can’t be taken for granted. But the party has never been able to take her vote for granted. And with the Republicans taking over the House, her status as a somewhat independent-minded senator matters much less anyway. Anything that happens in the next Congress will need to happen with Republican Party support, and Sinema is likely to want to be in the mix on bipartisan dealmaking rather than left out in the cold.
It’s actually the modest practical difference to her political situation — she is up for re-election in 2024 — that makes this a clever power move for Sinema.
Her proximate problem is that with Senator Mark Kelly and Governor-elect Katie Hobbs having won statewide races in Arizona last month, she is acutely vulnerable to a primary challenge from the left — most likely from Representative Ruben Gallego of Phoenix. The threat of a Gallego challenge has been lurking for a while. But the Kelly and Hobbs wins hurt her in two ways.
Most crassly, had Republicans won those races, Gallego — A Harvard graduate and ex-Marine who’s ambitious and restless in the House — would have been tempted to challenge Kari Lake in 2026 or Blake Masters in 2028 rather than risk the strife of an party primary. With Kelly and Hobbs in place, his best path to upward mobility runs through Sinema.
In a more high-minded sense, the problem for Sinema is simply that Kelly’s win tends to undermine any argument she might make that her approach to politics is an electoral necessity in the state. Even progressives who don’t like Senator Joe Manchin or his politics can see that they are very lucky to have him in West Virginia. But Arizona is a state dominated by a single large metropolitan area where the political winds have been blowing left and where Republicans have a marked tendency to nominate weirdos.
Gallego could clearly win statewide in Arizona, especially because the case for Sinema’s electability is weak on the merits. In general, her posture of independent thinking and bipartisanship is politically appealing, but the specific issues on which she’s defected — limiting the scope of Medicare price negotiation and preserving the preferential tax treatment of private equity fund managers’ income — are not exactly plays for the broad center of public opinion. It’s easy to imagine a Mexican-American Marine Corps veteran with a strong populist message on tax fairness and affordable health care outperforming Sinema among the state’s working-class Hispanic voters. Meanwhile, Emily’s List and NARAL, two natural pillars of support for a woman facing a primary challenge from a man, have already disowned Sinema because her stalwart support for the filibuster prevented her from delivering on their abortions-rights priorities.
Under the circumstances, going independent could be Sinema’s best way to avoid near-certain defeat.
There is another way her independent status could complicate her re-election bid. Gallego or anyone else can run for and win the Democratic nomination — and she’ll still be there in the race as a possible ticket-splitting spoiler who could hand the seat to the GOP. Her ask to the state and national party will be that it should do for her what it already does for Angus King in Maine and Bernie Sanders in Vermont: That is, decline to nominate a candidate and let the independent serve as the de facto Democratic nominee.
Arizona is a state that’s trended blue in recent cycles, but it's still very much a swing state. With Sinema on the ticket as an independent vacuuming up the votes of McCain Republicans and a handful of moderate Democrats, a MAGA-type Republican could easily win the state. Democrats’ best hope of retaining their Senate majority, under the circumstances, would then be to try to strong-arm Gallego out of the race.
Would that actually work? I’m skeptical. The most likely result of this course of action is that that the GOP picks up the seat. But from a narrowly selfish standpoint, it does seem like Sinema’s best path forward.
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ABOUT THE WRITER
Matthew Yglesias is a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. A co-founder of and former columnist for Vox, he writes the Slow Boring blog and newsletter. He is author, most recently, of “One Billion Americans.”
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
