Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Kyrsten Sinema leaving Senate at Year End

She is a weird duck.

Great news, does it mean Lake will win?

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (I-Ariz.) will not seek a second term, she announced Tuesday after more than a year of side-stepping questions about her political future.

Why it matters: Her exit clears the way for a likely matchup between Republican Kari Lake and Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego in a contest that could determine control of the Senate.

As Lake and Gallego ramped up their campaigns, it became increasingly clear that Sinema's path to victory was extremely narrow.
Sinema won in 2018 as a Democrat, becoming the first non-Republican to win an Arizona Senate seat since 1994.

What they're saying: "The only political victories that matter these days are symbolic — attacking your opponents on cable news or social media. Compromise is a dirty word," Sinema said in a video announcing her retirement and lamenting the breakdown of bipartisanship.

"I believe in my approach, but it's not what America wants right now," she continued.
"Because I choose civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done, I will leave the Senate at the end of this year."

Zoom in: During her first term, Sinema positioned herself as a moderate — often frustrating Democratic leadership who had to court her vote on the party's top progressive priorities.

Her position as a centrist swing vote allowed her to play an outsized role in major legislation like the bipartisan infrastructure law, the Inflation Reduction Act and the $280 billion Chips and Science Act.
When Sinema stood in the way of the Democratic attempt to repeal the filibuster in 2022, the Arizona Democratic Party censured her.
In December 2022, she announced she would leave the Democratic Party and become an independent.

PHOENIX – Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema said she won’t run for re-election and will retire after this term, ending for now the political run of one of Congress’s most productive and controversial lawmakers, a centrist who forged bipartisan deals while also regularly angering progressive Democrats.

“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 Tuesday.

The independent senator, who left the Democratic Party in 2022, would have faced a tough path to re-election had she decided to run. She was seen as having an uphill fight in a prospective three-way contest with Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego and Republican former TV host Kari Lake, a close ally of former President Donald Trump.

Sinema was a pathbreaking figure in Arizona, becoming the first Democrat to win a Senate seat there in 30 years. She made her mark in several major legislation battles related to infrastructure, guns and same-sex marriage protections. She was most recently involved in bipartisan efforts to secure the southern U.S. border, which she described to The Wall Street Journal as “the hardest thing we’ve done.” That legislation, months in the making, stalled earlier this year after many congressional Republicans said it wasn’t tough enough.

The race to replace Sinema could decide control of the Senate, where Democrats and independents aligned with them currently have a thin 51 to 49 majority. Sen. Joe Manchin (D., W.Va.), a fellow centrist, is retiring, and Democrats acknowledge they will lose that seat. The races in Arizona as well as other competitive states such as Montana and Ohio are seen as critical.

Sinema was seen as an outspoken progressive when she was a member of the state legislature from 2004 to 2012, then came to the U.S. House in 2013 shifting toward the center as the years went on. She won her 2018 campaign by running as a moderate.

In her more than five years in the Senate, Sinema has had a complicated relationship with Democrats, who she continued to be aligned with after leaving the party. She was a reliable vote on Biden’s judicial and executive-branch nominees, including Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, while occasionally throwing up roadblocks to some of his picks.

However, she also repeatedly blocked key pieces of Biden’s agenda that she saw as ill-conceived. She refused to help Senate Democrats end or weaken filibuster rules, which require 60 votes to advance most legislation. She made Biden scale back his multibillion-dollar Build Back Better agenda. She single handedly forced the party to scuttle its plans to raise the top marginal rates for corporate, capital-gains and individual-income taxes. Later, she made the party drop plans to increase taxes on a key source of private-equity managers’ income.

Such stances fueled a backlash, helping push her to exit from the party. In one incident, activists chased her into a bathroom at Arizona State University. In others, progressives exploded on social media after she curtsied when casting a vote related to a minimum-wage increase that went against many Democrats’ position.

Had she chosen to run for re-election, her path to the nomination would have been difficult, something her own team acknowledged. A flier circulated by Sinema’s camp at one point and viewed by the Journal said a winning formula for her could include 10%-20% of Democrats, 60%-70% of independent voters and 25%-35% of Republicans—margins that far exceed her 2018 totals with independents and Republicans.

Sinema had started 2023 with a plan to run for re-election; the Journal reported in April that her team had laid out a timeline for a potential run. But in the months since, she didn’t follow through on her plan.

Sinema hasn’t been soliciting past donors for money and has canceled fundraisers over the last several months. She raised just $600,000 last quarter. Still, she ended last year with $10.6 million in her campaign account, far more than Gallego’s $6.5 million or Lake’s roughly $1 million, recent fundraising reports showed.

To get on the ballot as an independent candidate, Sinema would have needed more than 40,000 signatures from registered voters by April, a task that had started to look harder— and more expensive—by the day.

Arizona will be a top political battleground in the 2024 election for not only the Senate but control of the White House and House of Representatives as well. The state, a once Republican bastion, has narrowly been electing Democrats statewide since Sinema’s win in 2018. While Democrats are the smallest voting bloc here, they trail Republicans and independents in that order, Democratic candidates have pulled in enough independents and moderate Republicans to win the last several cycles. Those voters have moved away from former President Donald Trump and his GOP allies, including Lake.

She wants to be Governor. Everyone HATES hobbs and her crew.

Axios (I know...) says that in the three-way race she was in with Lake and Gallego (D) she was unlikely to win. Would think that this makes it more difficult for Lake.

https://www.axios.com/2024/03/05/kyrsten-sinema-arizona-senate-reelection

She is a weird duck.

I wonder if someone basically bought off Sinema in one way or another for some similar reason?