How Sinema's exit is a measure of Democrats' success

She didn't steal the thunder so much as she revealed she's been beaten at her own game as Democrats surged

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It’s been a few days of digesting what it means for Democrats that Arizona’s Senator Kirsten Sinema announced she’s leaving the Democratic Party to become an independent.

After reading many takes, I now think there’s been just a bit too much hand-wringing over her selfishly stealing the spotlight and throwing 2024 into stark relief (and I engaged in some of that myself), and not enough celebrating that the moment of Sinema’s departure underscored how big Democrats won in the Senate, how far they’ve come and what their strategy should be for the future. (And special thanks to Dan Rather and Eliott Kirshner, who sent me in this direction.)

Aaron Rupar @atrupar

Kyrsten Sinema just exudes phoniness

Imagine yourself for a moment in Sinema’s stillettos earlier this year.

Like the rest of us, she watched as the corporate media railed on for months about a red wave coming, with even the possibility — which, weeks before the election, morphed into the probably — that the GOP would take the Senate.

According to the media narrative — which was super-fueled by biased GOP polls that dominated the polling averages — John Fetterman was rapidly deflating. Herschel Walker was likely going to beat Raphael Warnock. Catherine Cortez Masto? Finished before she even began. Mark Kelly was in trouble, and Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hamsphire could be taken down by a crazed election denier. Even Patty Murray in deep blue Washington was at great risk, the headlines blared!

Surely, Sinema was intoxicated by all of that.

She’d plotted in meticulous, years-long maneuvers, positioning herself as the brilliant center-right Democrat who knew the future — not only in her own state of Arizona, but also for the entire country. And, in her mind, if the media narrative of the 2022 election played out, Sinema would be vindicated: Democrats will have gone too far to the left, causing a gargantuan disaster for their party.

All those activists who hounded her, demanding she hold town meetings, imploring her to save their rights — some of whom even followed her into a public restroom to plead with her — would be proven completely out of touch with reality, she surely imagined.

The only Democrat to be proven right, Sinema certainly envisioned, would be Kirsten Sinema, whose own Arizona colleague Mark Kelly (who, by the way, she didn’t lift a finger to help in his re-election campaign), will even have gone down to defeat.

“If only Mark had listened to me,” Sinema surely was thinking she’d be saying, even if only to herself — “If only they’d all listened to me!”

So, you can then only imagine what was going on in Sinema’s well-coiffed head as election results came in one-by-one on the night of November 8th and in the days following.

Every one of those Democrats ran as supporters of raising the minimum wage, raising taxes on the wealthy and ending the filibuster so we could codify Roe v. Wade into law and pass voting right legislation — all of which Sinema opposed, sometimes in dramatic fashion.

And some of those incumbent senators were in states in which the environment was enormously difficult, such as Cortez Masto, who won in Nevada even as Democratic Governor Steve Sisolak lost, and Raphael Warnock, who prevailed even as Republicans won in every other statewide race in Georgia.

Oh, yes, the one-two punch had to be the Georgia Senate runoff, in which Sinema might have been secretly hoping Walker would win, which would help her salvage something out of her grave miscalculations. Maybe she could then announce she was becoming a Republican (or an independent caucusing with the GOP), and hand control of the Senate to the GOP?

Instead, Sinema was left with no moves except the risky one she took.

She looked at the polling and realized she couldn’t win a Democratic primary in Arizona in 2024. While her running as an independent in the general election might split the Democratic vote and hand the seat to a Republican — and thus, announcing she was becoming an independent was a way for her to send a warning to Democrats about challenging her — it could also go the other way, as I noted over the weekend. Sinema could be left high and dry in a 2024 race while Democrats vote for the Democratic candidate, Republicans vote for the Republican candidate, and independents split between both.

So, it’s risky, but it’s all she’s got. It’s two years away, and surely there will be lots of discussion about what could happen — and a lot of planning by Democrats to thwart Sinema’s move.

But what is clear is that Arizona’s electorate has shifted much more rapidly than Sinema, as well as many political observers, had previously thought. The 2020 election in fact helped to speed that movement, something that became clear to many. Sinema, however, was so wed to the fantasy she’d created of being the new John McCain that she opted for self-delusion. She was so full of herself, believing she was so politically savvy — and surely being told that by sycophants around her — that she didn’t feel the desert earth shifting beneath her.

In that way, Sinema’s withdrawal from the Democratic Party is a vindication for many of us of how wrong her strategy was and how right the strategy of all those Democratic candidates who won — who ran on getting the base out, rather than pandering to the mythical middle — is for the Democratic party moving forward.

None of this is to downplay how self-centered and narcissistic Sinema is as a politician, nor how detrimental her action can be for Democrats in 2024, during a dangerous time in America. She’s ruthless, and vile, putting herself before democracy and the American people. And we can’t underplay that as we plan for 2024.

But it’s pretty fantastic that, after the 2022 mid-terms, Sinema, rather than crowing that she was right, is in a political crisis of her own making. She’s running scared as Democrats have surged, as they’ve cemented a blueprint running on abortion rights, voting rights, threats to democracy, and progressive economic policies. Her exit is indeed a measure of the party’s success.