Kyrsten Sinema’s Long, Messy Breakup With Arizona Democrats

• The relationship between Sen. Kyrsten Sinema and Arizona Democrats has completely broken down.
• The Arizona Democratic Party is furious at her support for the Senate filibuster.
• But their disagreements stretch much farther back, to Sinema’s days as a congresswoman.

For three years, Sen. Kyrsten Sinema had been elusive. Local Democrats had marshaled their forces and cash to help elect her to the Senate. But after that, state party officials told Insider, Sinema has rarely engaged with them, declining to hold large public town halls or meetings with state party figures and leaving key Democrats confused by her stance on major issues.

Then on June 23, 2021, they caught their white whale: they’d gotten a meeting with Sinema, just as they were approaching their breaking point.

When the Arizona Democratic Party formally censured Sinema last week, it was not a sudden fit of pique, but the conclusion of a long-deteriorating relationship between Arizona’s senior senator and her state’s party machine. Insider spoke with seven members of the Arizona Democratic Party about their organization’s frustration with Sinema, which had been building since her election to the Senate in 2018.

The senator’s blockage of President Joe Biden’s key legislative proposals, coupled with what local Democrats view as her inaccessibility in the state, has led to a breakdown with little chance of healing. Should the schism persist, it could affect Sinema’s ability to run a successful re-election campaign in 2024.

“Her support among the party members has collapsed,” Michael Slugocki, a vice-chairperson of the Arizona Democratic Party, told Insider. “People are frankly done with her.”

Much of the outrage directed at Sinema now was fomented back on that June call. Furious at her support for keeping the Senate filibuster, which party members saw as a blockade to voting rights legislation, equality measures, and other key elements of the Democratic agenda, they wanted to press Sinema on her rationale for the vote and urge her to change her position. Despite their differences with the senator, they hoped for a productive dialogue.

What happened instead, as board member Brianna Westbrook told Insider, was “one of the most …one-sided

Zoom

calls I’ve ever participated in.”

Sinema kept her camera off for the duration of the Zoom call, according to Westbrook. 

In a recording of the meeting obtained by Insider, Sinema can be heard reading an eight-minute statement in response to pre-submitted questions from the executive board.

 “I understand the frustration about the lack of bipartisan cooperation, and I often share it because I was elected to get things done for Arizona,” Sinema said. “But as you know, I believe that all or nothing political battles leave us with nothing, and they don’t help us achieve lasting results.”

Westbrook asked Sinema to commit to “holding three town halls by the end of October.” Sinema declined to commit, telling Westbrook and the board to follow up with a staffer overseeing her schedule.

“I am out in the state all the time, working with folks, listening to folks, and ensuring that I and my team are hearing from constituents throughout the state,” Sinema said. “And that of course is something that obviously I remain committed to.”

The board members asked three questions before Sinema had to leave.

The call only lasted 17 minutes, but the damage was done. 

Six months later, Sinema enraged members of her own party by voting with Senate Republicans to keep the filibuster intact, thereby ensuring the failure of two pieces of voting rights legislation that were top priorities for Democrats. 

Sinema’s office pushed back on criticism that she had not been accessible in the state and provided Insider with a lengthy list of local interviews, tele-town halls, and in-person events she had held over the past year. 

“Arizona input and values fuel Senator Sinema’s work and she consistently meets with and hears from folks across the state, including in recent weeks when she has held numerous in-person and virtual meetings and calls with Arizonans of all backgrounds – from student groups to civil rights leaders –on a variety of issues,” a Sinema spokesperson Hannah Hurley said in a statement to Insider.

“She hasn’t considered who’s gonna knock on doors for her, who’s gonna phone bank for her,” Slugocki said. “I can’t think of a person who’s gonna phone bank for her or door knock for her in 2024. Everyone who got her into office in 2018 is done with her.”

‘She was the AOC of Arizona’

Democrats who knew Sinema back in the day have a hard time squaring the onetime Green Party activist who championed LGBTQ rights and fought against Republican-backed immigration laws with the senator who they believe now votes against her party’s interests.

Sinema started out as a member of the Arizona Green Party, working on Ralph Nader’s 2000 presidential campaign. She once protested outside a 2003 campaign event for then-Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman in Tucson, calling him “a shame to Democrats,” according to Mother Jones.

“I don’t even know why he’s running,” Sinema said at the time. “He seems to want to get Republicans voting for him—what kind of strategy is that?”

Sinema briefly became an Independent before officially making the switch to the Democratic Party. In 2008, she was elected to the Arizona House of Representatives. While serving in the state legislature, “She was a voice in the Arizona Democratic Party for immigrants, Latinos, against some of the most conservative Republican voices,” said Dan O’Neal, an official with the Arizona Democratic Party and organizer with Progressive Democrats of America.

“She was the AOC of Arizona at one point,” O’Neal said, referring to New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who has become the face of young progressives.

Sinema got elected to the US House of Representatives in 2012, and her shift to the middle commenced. 

“I think the expectation was that she would continue to represent the way she did in the state legislature,” said Patti Serrano, chair of the Arizona Democratic Party’s progressive caucus and who years later would help draft a September 2021 resolution threatening to censure Sinema. “There was the expectation that that Sinema would continue, and it did not.”

Sinema joined the House’s main moderate caucus, the Blue Dog Democrats, and would occasionally take votes that baffled Democrats back home.

Slugocki cited Sinema’s 2015 vote in favor of a House bill that placed more stringent screening requirements on refugees. It wasn’t that she was one of 48 Democrats to vote with Republicans that puzzled Arizona Democrats. It was the fact that she had touted her record working with refugees before going into politics, and as a lawyer in 2007 had represented an Iraqi refugee…