Sayonara, Sinema: Good riddance to bad Democrats 

After more than a year of will-she-won’t-she drama, Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema finally acknowledged on Tuesday afternoon that she would not seek re-election in November.  

That’s hardly surprising: By some polling, Sinema is now one of the most unpopular politicians in Arizona history. She ends her long and tumultuous career as a politically homeless pariah whose personal ambition far outweighed her strategic ability.  

Sinema’s unsurprising retirement follows that of President Joe Biden’s other senatorial bête noire, West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin. Manchin announced his own retirement in November, after stoking speculation that he might run for president on a third-party line. Manchin and Sinema are uniquely reviled in Democratic circles as turncoats and egotists who dashed some of Biden’s most ambitious legislative goals against the rocks of their own self-interest.  

Good riddance to bad Democrats. 

Sinema and Manchin’s legacies are defined by the positive change they obstructed and the governmental dysfunction they abetted, from smug high-fives over supporting the filibuster to derailing critical federal voting rights legislation. When voters complain that Congress is broken and unresponsive to America’s crisis of democracy, it is largely Sinema’s and Manchin’s antics they are condemning. Now both figures will be grim footnotes in senatorial history.  

Sinema’s career is more perplexing than most, because her roots are sunk deep into the foundations of the progressive movement. Two decades ago, Sinema launched her political career as the charismatic Green Party candidate for the Phoenix City Council. She then found her voice among Democrats’ Bush-era progressives, before evolving into one of corporate America’s friendliest political allies. By 2021, the same Sinema who once pledged to raise worker pay was unapologetically killing a federal $15 minimum wage bill. 

It was clear from Sinema’s early days in the Senate that she hoped to model her tenure on another Arizona icon — the late Sen. John McCain. Sinema often referenced McCain’s maverick streak as something she hoped to emulate. But unlike McCain, Sinema lacked a sense of political timing and the ability to build durable cross-party coalitions. Her sudden departure from the Democratic Party didn’t make her a more powerful senator; instead, it made her even easier for both Democrats and Republicans to ignore.  

Sinema’s career is defined not only by the worthy efforts her obstructionism halted, but also in the countless ways her lust for headlines harmed the constituents who depended on her. When her constituents called for action following the repeal of Roe v. Wade in 2022, Sinema instead doubled down on defending a filibuster rule that made action impossible. In the wake of her inaction, Arizona has now become the latest anti-abortion battleground state, with the health and safety of hundreds of thousands of Arizona women now at risk. 

When Democrats sought to make good on Biden’s ambitious social spending plan — something one of Sinema’s old political personas had strongly supported — she instead stood lockstep with megacorporations and killed Senate Democrats’ tax plan. That bizarre display even put Sinema to the right of Manchin, who, like most Americans, recognizes runaway corporate greed when he sees it. As a result, thousands of low-income Arizonans struggle to make ends meet as Sinema’s pharmaceutical industry donors rake in record profits. 

Toward the end of her career, Sinema seemed to delight in thumbing her nose at the media, her colleagues, her constituents and anyone who dared to demand she actually care about the job. Despite it being clear for months that Sinema wasn’t running — her virtually nonexistent fundraising over the past few quarters attests to that — she refused to step aside in favor of a legislator who actually wanted to do the hard work of governing. In normal times, that kind of arrogance would reflect poorly on a politician. In the time of national crisis in which we now find ourselves, Sinema’s apathy is unforgivable.  

The only thing that can be said about Sinema’s Senate career is that both Democrats and democracy are better off without her. Rarely has an elected official regarded their responsibilities with such disdain and dismissiveness, and been so hated by their own voters in return. In fact, Sinema did such a poor job that hatred of her is one of the few issues that unites Arizona’s bitterly divided Democrats and Republicans. That’s saying something. 

In the absence of Manchin and Sinema, governing will still be difficult, but it will be immeasurably easier with a Democratic Party freed from its bad-faith obstructionists. That’s something worth celebrating. 

Max Burns is a veteran Democratic strategist and founder of Third Degree Strategies.