Democrats Blew Their Chance with Sinema

By Jim Geraghty

Friday, December 09, 2022

 

Gee, Democrats, maybe you shouldn’t have chased Kyrsten Sinema into the bathroom last October . . . and after those feces-flinging howler monkeys did that, maybe you should have denounced them more loudly and made Sinema feel like you cared about her.

 

But instead of offering a “No one deserves to be treated like that. Our political differences should not spill into harassment in bathrooms,” statement, President Joe Biden equivocated: “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics but it happens to everybody. . . . It’s a part of the process.”

 

It wasn’t the bathroom incident alone that made Sinema leave the Democratic Party, but it was a vivid signifier that her party’s activist class absolutely hated her guts and preferred intimidation and harassment to persuasion, and that the rest of the party’s leadership, like Biden, didn’t feel any compulsion to defend her.

 

Sinema announced this morning that she was leaving the Democratic Party and registering as an independent, shocking the political world:

 

Everyday Americans are increasingly left behind by national parties’ rigid partisanship, which has hardened in recent years. Pressures in both parties pull leaders to the edges, allowing the loudest, most extreme voices to determine their respective parties’ priorities and expecting the rest of us to fall in line.

 

In catering to the fringes, neither party has demonstrated much tolerance for diversity of thought. Bipartisan compromise is seen as a rarely acceptable last resort, rather than the best way to achieve lasting progress. Payback against the opposition party has replaced thoughtful legislating. . . .

 

I promised I would never bend to party pressure, and I would stay focused on solving problems and getting things done for everyday Arizonans.

 

My approach is rare in Washington and has upset partisans in both parties.

 

It is also an approach that has delivered lasting results for Arizona.

 

Your mileage may vary, but I see a “Don’t chase me into bathrooms, you insane weirdos” subtext.

 

Sinema will continue to caucus with the Democrats, so her move won’t change the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. She’s basically becoming another Angus King, the Maine “independent” senator who votes with the Biden administration’s position 98.3 percent of the time, according to FiveThirtyEight. If you want to be really cynical, you can interpret this as a branding issue as Sinema prepares for a reelection bid in two years.

 

But this move isn’t purely symbolic. Sinema voted with the Biden administration 93 percent of the time, but that statistic doesn’t reflect the fact that, on the really big issues, she was the one who required concessions from the rest of her party and dragged out the negotiations. By the time the legislation came to the Senate floor, she had forced the rest of the party to make at least some adjustments to make it acceptable to her. Sinema wants to steer legislation in a center-left direction, and a lot of her colleagues want to steer it in a left-left direction.

 

Because of Sinema’s deviation from their wish-list, a significant chunk of Arizona Democrats hate her guts, and the senator apparently doesn’t see any point in pretending that her worldview overlaps with theirs in a significant way anymore. As I laid out after the bathroom incident, a certain segment of the Democratic Party’s base believes that anyone who hinders or delays them from getting what they want is an enemy, not merely an opponent or unreliable ally. If you keep treating a member of your party like she’s an enemy, sooner or later she will decide she might as well become an enemy.

 

Also, I want to point to a conversation I had with Hugh Hewitt on his radio program on August 4 of this year:

 

Hugh Hewitt: Could she go Ben Nighthorse Campbell and just go all the way and say I’m the new Reagan? I have been here for four years, and these people are just not working in the best, I’m going to be a Republican. I’m going to join with Susan Collins and Shelley Moore Capito, and we are going to represent the center of the new Republican Party and the center of America, and we are going to make stuff happen. Any chance, Jim Geraghty?

 

Jim Geraghty: Extraordinarily unlikely, at least as the Republican Party is constituted today. I do think maybe she does an Angus King, you know, some sort of I’m an independent, but I caucus with the Democrats sort of thing. Could the Republican Party eventually bring her over? You know, stranger things have happened. I suppose it’s conceivably possible, but it would probably have to be a different Republican Party than it is right now, because let’s be honest. For all of her frustration of Democrats, for all of the fact that she puts her home state values first, for all of the fact that she is not willing to toe the progressive line, Hugh, we should not fool ourselves. This woman is not a conservative.

 

There are also tactical advantages for Sinema, as she will no longer run for reelection as a Democrat, meaning that she cannot lose the upcoming Democratic Senate primary. At the beginning of the year, Sinema was more popular among Arizona’s Republicans than among Arizona’s Democrats. After Sinema signed on to the revised Build Back Better, the so-called “Inflation Reduction Act,” she lost support among Republicans but didn’t win back as many Democrats; a September poll found that 37 percent of Democrats, 41 percent of independents, and 36 percent of Republicans in her state feel favorable toward her. Her road to reelection is not easy, but she will now be able to skip the primary, enjoy the advantages of incumbency, and will only need the largest plurality in a three-way race. Progressives really, really wanted U.S. representative Ruben Gallego to challenge Sinema in the primary; he’s the Daily Kos candidate — man, back in 2006, those words really meant something — with a lifetime ACU rating of 4.36 out of 100. (Sinema’s is 14.73.) We’ve all seen the sterling judgment of Arizona Republican primary voters in recent cycles, so it’s not that difficult to envision a scenario of a three-way race with a far-left Democratic Senate candidate, a far-right Republican Senate candidate, and Sinema scooping out just enough votes in the middle.

 

I remain skeptical that Sinema will ever switch to the Republican Party, or at least the GOP in its current form.

 

The party switching we saw in previous years usually involved idiosyncratic figures whose voting record and state interests simply no longer aligned with the interests of the national party — usually even bigger splits than the pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-Dreamer Sinema has with today’s Democrats. In Colorado, Ben Nighthorse Campbell had always been on the conservative side of the Democratic Party and had grown increasingly combative in his disputes with the leaders of the Colorado Democratic Party. He had always supported a constitutional amendment to require a balanced budget, and almost every other Senate Democrat had opposed the move. Finally, in March 1995, Nighthorse Campbell switched over to the new GOP Senate majority.

 

Vermont senator Jim Jeffords’s jump from the Republican Party to the Democratic Party was almost overdue when it occurred in early 2001. As our John Fund recalled, Jeffords was “always a liberal Republican who backed federal education spending and environmental regulation. When serving in the House, he was the only Republican to vote against President Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts in 1981. As a senator, he opposed the nomination appointment of Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.” Some evidence suggests that the Senate majority flipped because Republicans and Jeffords couldn’t work out their differences over the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact, Jeffords’s costly and distortive pet project that kept milk prices higher to benefit Vermont dairy farmers. The consequences of Jeffords’s decision were relatively short-lived, as the GOP won back the Senate majority in 2002 and Jeffords chose to retire because of ill health in 2006.

 

And then there was Pennsylvania senator Arlen Specter, who switched parties from Republicans to Democrats in 2009 out of principle . . . the principle that he didn’t want to lose his upcoming primary to Pat Toomey.