Is Kyrsten Sinema Setting Herself Up for a Primary Challenger?

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ)

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has made a career of creating contradictions.  Her biography is the stuff of legend if you're at all a political junkie.  She purportedly grew up so poor that she at one point didn't have running water & lived in an abandoned gas station, but others counter these tales of childhood poverty are fabricated.  She was a Mormon who left the church after graduating from Brigham Young University, and eventually became an attorney.  She worked for the Green Party before becoming a Democratic state legislator.  She famously avoids cable news interviews while wearing colorful wigs that become trending topics on Twitter.  She was once an acolyte for Ralph Nader who eventually became a moderate Democratic legislator who voted against a minimum wage increase.  While figures like Joe Manchin or Bernie Sanders are completely divergent in the party, you can find some sense of what their core principles are, what drives them in politics (or what they want to achieve).  Sinema, though, is an enigma, not just because of her atypical attitude toward the job, but because it's hard to pinpoint down exactly what she believes since so much of her career is about as she seems to shift positions with the wind (other than a clear, unmistakable support for abortion rights).  As a result, while it's oftentimes easy to see what Manchin is looking for in negotiations, the other important moderate that Democrats have to convince on any major legislation in the next two years is much harder to understand.

Sinema I bring up because yesterday a poll was released showing her in an unusual position, one that we don't see very often in modern politics.  Sinema's approval rating was underwater 39-40%, but a large part of what was driving that was her lack of support amongst Democrats.  Sinema had a 40% unfavorable ranking with Democrats, a number that matched her ranking with Republicans...there is probably no other federal public officeholder today who could boast such a strange cross-section of voters-Sinema is essentially about as popular with her own party as she is with the opposition (though with neither party is she that popular).  Sen. Mark Kelly, more popular than Sinema, gets at that through having considerably better numbers than her with Democrats than with Republicans.

This poses an interesting question for Sinema and her political future though, as she wades through her first time (ever) in a legislative majority-what direction does she take in a Congress where her bills have a genuine chance of passing through a Democratic majority (i.e. she doesn't need Republican names on her bills to help them pass), and where she very publicly has ascribed to a belief that we need to hang onto the filibuster, an increasingly at-odds viewpoint amongst her own party?  Sinema is not up again until 2024 (in 2022, it'll be Kelly who must face voters), but it's worth asking if her moderation is particularly smart for an incumbent has needed strong political incumbents to get to her current position.

Sinema's calculus seems accurate.  When she was elected, she was the first Democrat in thirty years to win Arizona, through a combination of a good year, solid campaigning, & a lousy opponent.  But it was also because Arizona is shifting leftward.  The populous Maricopa County continues to get bluer, and with that her credentials get more solidified.  Purple state Democrats generally get easy passes to renomination, but they also don't have to worry about their state changing dramatically underneath them.  Figures like Sherrod Brown or Amy Klobuchar get to take a moderate stance or two because their electorate knows they have to, and generally they stay inline when it matters.  But with Sinema publicly backing the filibuster, she's not following their playbook-she's trying to go the Manchin route, but Joe Manchin knows "it's me or nothing" in ruby red West Virginia.  With Mark Kelly & Joe Biden both winning Arizona recently, the Democrats have options if they actually wanted to take on Sinema...she's not the only person who can win there.

I think at this point that Sinema is probably playing the game wrong, but not critically wrong.  I think she'll come to regret her stance on the filibuster in a system that rewards loyalty & in a state that will increasingly be friendly to more liberal figures.  In 2024, Arizona won't be blue enough for a traditional progressive challenger (a Cori Bush or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would still lose statewide), and we have not seen someone who votes like Mark Kelly getting into a primary against someone just mildly to his right.  The odds are that Sinema will be the nominee in 2024 for the Democrats no matter what she does because it's very hard to take on an incumbent in a seat you might lose otherwise, and losing her seat would guarantee the Democrats don't hold the majority.  But I do think this is a risky game-drawing these lines makes Sinema vulnerable in the primary, and it also puts too much credit on those Republican voters.  Because at the end of the day if Sinema wins reelection in a state that will be super swing-y in three years, it won't be those Republicans who tepidly support her who reelect the senator, it'll be the Democrats that she's currently pissing off.