How Kyrsten Sinema killed her own political career

The anatomy of a fall

Welcome to a Tuesday evening edition of Progress Report.

Calling it Super Tuesday is a generous description of the various primary elections being held today, but they’ve got to hype political coverage somehow, so we’ll stick with tradition.

The most interesting primary races are happening in Texas, where Gov. Greg Abbott fell short of ousting enough of the rural Republicans who blew up his school privatization bill and reformer prosecutors enjoyed a night of landslide victories. In California, Adam Schiff and crypto dark money sank Katie Porter in the Senate primary while AIPAC dropped $4.5 million in the race to replace Porter for no obvious reason.

There were also some compelling Democratic primaries in the North Carolina legislature, where progressives were challenging entrenched conservative Democrats. Oh, and more than 20% of Democratic primary voters in Minnesota chose “uncommitted” over Joe Biden. He may want to listen to Gov. Tim Walz on this one.

We’ll touch on those elections in an upcoming newsletter, but tonight we’re analyzing the biggest news of the day, which concerns somebody who is not running for office this year.

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Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema announced on Tuesday that she would not be running for re-election in November, sparing herself the indignity of getting smoked in a three-way election and sparing the rest of us eight months of worrying that her presence in the race could put psychotic Trump acolyte Kari Lake in the US Senate.

In a video that accompanied the announcement, Sinema blamed her exit on the American public’s rejection of civility, a nervy assertion from somebody who left the Democratic Party and once posted a photo of herself wearing a ring with the words “Fuck Off” bejeweled across the top. All that time spent alone on private planes and Sinema still couldn’t manage to do any useful self-reflection.

“I think she thought Republicans and independents would vote for her anyway in the beginning, but Republicans just liked her obstruction,” one operative in Arizona told me this afternoon. “They were never going to support an unpredictable bisexual woman who likes wearing colored wigs on the Senate floor. Her greed and miscalculations led her here. She has no one to blame but herself.”

Over the past two years, I’ve closely covered Sinema’s rapid ascent from low-profile lawmaker to perhaps the most reviled politician in her home state and possibly the country. Here are five key moments and reasons that led to Sinema’s demise.

5. The thumbs down and the corruption that followed

Sinema wouldn’t have made any friends among Democratic voters had she simply voted against the $15 minimum wage amendment to the American Rescue Plam, but it was the curtsy that accompanied her vote that truly put her on the villain map.

Sinema’s stunt took the spotlight off the Senate leadership’s costly institutionalism and made her the subject of ire. Outrage grew a few months later, when I found video of Sinema promising to support businesses that vehemently opposed the minimum wage increase at the conventions of the state Chamber of Commerce and National Restaurant Association.

The comments created the impression that she favored big donors over working Americans, which she happily affirmed over the next few years.

4. The AZ Democratic Party censure

I spent a lot of time covering the burgeoning schism between Sinema and Arizona Democrats in late 2021 and early 2022, speaking with activists and local politicians about the strategies they were deploying and how sentiment was changing on the ground.

In hindsight, it was this long sequence of events that really changed everything.