Democratic Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona has officially renounced her Democratic party membership to become an Independent Senator.
The move allows her to join ranks of Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont, nominal Independents who caucus reliably with the Democrats.
Her decision comes immediately off the heels of the Georgia runoffs last Tuesday, in which Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock defeated former football star Herschel Walker (R) to win a full term in the Senate. The runoff put a bow on the contentious and drawn-out 2022 Midterm season. Warnock’s win helped Democrats solidify a net gain of one seat in the upper chamber, with John Fetterman’s (D) flip in Pennsylvania. Now, Senator Sinema’s change of allegiance complicates that tenuous majority.
Kind of.
According to the Lugar Center, a non-profit Washington, D.C.-based organization that tracks politicians via their Bipartisan Index, Senator Sinema was the fifth-most bipartisan Senator during the 116th Congress (2019-2020) and the fourth-most bipartisan during the first half of the 117th Congress (2021).
Naturally, this angers voters and party leadership alike on both sides of the aisle.
Sinema was first elected in the 2018 Midterms, defeating former House-Rep Martha McSally (R) for the open seat vacated by moderate Republican Jeff Flake, who was openly critical of the more Trump-like aspects of the GOP. Sinema won a close contest in a decent night for Democrats across the board, even as the party posted a net loss of two seats in the Senate.
She became the first Democrat to win a US Senate race in Arizona since 1988 and the first Democrat to win a statewide contest there since Janet Napolitano was reelected Governor in 2006. She is also the first woman to be elected Senator from the Copper State. While still far from a blue state, the shift from a reliably Republican state cannot go unnoticed.
Since then, Sinema has compiled a more moderate voting record– much to the chagrin of party leadership. She’s also changed her tune from her time in Phoenix as a State Representative and State Senator before she was elected to the Phoenix-based Ninth Congressional District, where she served from 2013-2019.
She holds some more liberal views on issues such as abortion and LGBT rights. She has received high marks from Planned Parenthood and EMILY’s List on the former and has been a staunch advocate for the latter. As recently as this month, she was a lead cosponsor of the Respect for Marriage Act, which passed in the Senate in a 61-36 vote.
However, on fiscal and foreign issues, Sinema retains a conservative, or at least centrist, profile. Since her time in the House, she has worked with the GOP on efforts to repeal the estate tax, make the 2017 Trump tax cuts permanent, and voted to bar the FCC from regulating broadband rates.
However, she’s proven to be more of a loose cannon to Democratic agenda since her election to the Senate. A lot of her positions now are serious changes from previous seasons of her legislative career.
Regarding foreign policy, she was staunchly against foreign wars and nation building and was a core organizer against US efforts in the Middle East in the wake of the September 11 attacks, describing President Bush as a “fascist” and “imperialist.”
She has said her position on military force as “evolved,” claiming it’s an option that should not be off the table entirely, namely when it comes to genocide intervention.
Sinema also changed her tune regarding the Senate filibuster, a tactic that delay or block a Senate vote via virtually endless debate. Measures can advance with a 60-vote threshold, a number rarely attained by either party in the chamber. She once advocated for eschewing it earlier in her career to now being firmly against eliminating the filibuster and “not open to changing her mind” about it. Sinema was censured by the Arizona Democratic party for this vote.
She’s drawn recent ire among her party by voting down the Green New Deal, voting against abolishing ICE, voting against COVID-19 financial support to undocumented immigrants, and supporting the Thin Blue Line Act.
However, no recent vote has drawn much ire as Sinema’s emphatic vote against raising the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour. Her flash of a “thumbs down” was widely panned by the media and Democrats and likened to the late Senator John McCain’s (R-AZ) shock vote against repealing the ACA in 2017.
Sinema quickly went from a darling of the left making changes in a former red state, to one of the most heavily criticized moderates in the Senate. Only Democrat Joe Manchin of West Virginia is more conservative-moderate than Sinema in the upper chamber.
All of this boils down to the obvious: Sinema is a mixed bag when it comes to policy and evokes a more classical legislative approach that is usually more palatable to most voters: socially-liberal, fiscally-conservative.
But does this really change anything in the Senate? Probably not. Sinema has built a reliably moderate record and has not seriously fraternized with some aspects of the GOP. Speculation that she’ll switch to the GOP are mostly empty, because she told Politico that she will “not caucus with the Republicans” and that she “intends to vote the same way she has for four years in the Senate.”
All it does is change the numbers. There are technically 48 Democrats, 49 Republicans, and now 3 Independents, all of whom caucus with the Democrats. Bernie Sanders is a solid blue vote, ranking the 87th-most bipartisan Senator for 2021 according to the Lugar Center. Angus King of Maine is a reliable Democratic vote, but boasts a ranking of 20th-most bipartisan member of the Senate. So, unless the parties continue to shift dramatically and Sinema finds herself more akin to the GOP, the math isn’t likely to change substantially.
The bigger question: how the 2024 campaign will look in Arizona. As of 2020, the state has two Democratic Senators, the first time this has happened since 1953. Depending on how Presidential down-ballot energy looks, it could shake the race substantially.
Some say this hurts Sinema invariably. She’s not well-liked by registered Democrats, with registered Republicans slightly more approving of her according to a recent Suffolk poll. If she runs on the Democratic ticket, she might survive a primary from the liberal Democratic House Republican Ruben Gallego (CD-07) but winning a General Election means forming an eclectic coalition of moderate Republicans, Democrats and Independents. It’s not impossible but it is a challenge depending on how the Presidential race looks.
If she’s primaried by a liberal Democrat, Republicans might have the upper hand.
If Sinema runs as an Independent and Gallego runs as a liberal Democrat, it might result in enough vote splitting to hand it to a Republican, even if it is McSally, who’s now lost two Senate races in a row. The GOP will need to consult some wins-above-replacement models if Arizona goes to a three-way race. Sinema also runs the risk of running her first election as a party-switcher, a unique brand of politicians to whom history is only kind about less than half the time.
While Sinema’s abandonment of the Party of Jackson isn’t necessarily consequential to Senate decorum, it does provoke the bigger question: who else might the party lose with two years left of Biden’s term?
