Why the Sinema Enigma Matters
By retiring, Sen. Sinema could stop Kari Lake—and maybe Donald Trump—in Arizona.
ONE OF THE MOST INTRIGUING AND MYSTERIOUS of the 5311 people serving in the United States Congress will soon put to bed an intriguing mystery: Will Sen. Kyrsten Sinema try to win re-election as an independent in Arizona, or will she pack it in?
Sinema, known to sometimes work her wardrobe into the conversation, avoids the press and keeps her views and plans closely held. She has now become the last holdout of senators representing swing states up for election this cycle; all the others have announced their plans to either run again or retire.
Should she run again, Sinema could help elect GOP candidate Kari Lake to the Senate and Donald Trump to the White House in a critical battleground. Her retirement could make it harder for them.
A three-way race between Sinema, Lake, and Democrat Rep. Ruben Gallego is tied between Republican and Democrat, according to a recent poll. Sinema, as is consistent through all of the three-way matchup surveys, is in a distant third place and not breaking through.
If Sinema, the moderate, incumbent dealmaker, were to run, the progressive Gallego would lose votes to her. So would Lake. Polls show that Sinema would likely pull more from Lake than Gallego, but Gallego probably has a better shot in a two-way race against Lake—it makes the race more about Lake. Since polling shows Sinema never pulls even with either of them, her candidacy would risk Lake pulling out a win. Without Sinema in the picture, Gallego can move to the open center to become the choice of the independents and Republicans who are repelled by extremism and have delivered victories to Democrats statewide since 2018. That number, combined with an energized Democratic base, is likely enough to tip the race in his favor. Gallego has outraised Lake, and had $6.5 million compared to her roughly $1 million at the end of 2023.
As of now, a Sinema campaign looks unlikely.
Sinema’s fundraising slowed with each quarter last year. In addition, to secure her position on the November ballot as an independent, Sinema’s campaign would need to collect more than 42,000 signatures from registered voters by April 8. While she has the funds, and technically still has the time, her campaign does not appear to be doing this.
Sinema was no doubt putting off any announcement of her future plans while working on a bipartisan border security bill that Trump killed two weeks ago. When she made a rare Sunday show appearance on Face the Nation on February 4 to sell the legislation, she refused to answer a question about whether she’d be campaigning, saying “endless questions about politics and elections are exhausting. And it’s what makes Americans really hate politics.”
A former social worker, Sinema has journeyed from the state legislature, to the U.S. House of Representatives to the Senate—while evolving from a member of the Green party to someone too conservative for the Democratic party. Yet as she has drifted rightward, infuriating Democrats, Sinema has arguably been responsible for helping them, and President Joe Biden, cement every legislative achievement in the last three years.
Sinema left the party and became an independent in December 2022. Despite raising cash from GOP donors, and despite her close relationships with Republicans like Mitt Romney, Bill Cassidy, Thom Tillis, Mike Lee, and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell—to name a few—Sinema declined to become a Republican or to caucus with them.
There was a purpose beyond friendship or funds to Sinema’s fraternizing with Republicans. She has focused more on policy in five years in the Senate than most of her colleagues—Republican or Democrat. “I spend my days doing productive work, which is why I’ve been able to lead every bipartisan vote that’s happened the last two years,” Politico reported she told a gathering of Republicans last year.
Sinema was at the table for a string of remarkable bipartisan successes in the Senate since 2021: the infrastructure law, the CHIPS act to bolster semiconductor manufacturing, the PACT Act for veterans’ health care, the first gun reforms in decades, and the codification of same-sex marriage. So the tanking of the recent immigration deal she not only negotiated with Sen. James Lankford for four months, but had worked on for years, seemed to sting. After its official death Sinema threw uncharacteristic shade at her GOP friends who had carried Trump’s water.
“If you want to spin the border crisis for your own political agendas, go right ahead. If you want to continue to use the southern border as a backdrop for your political campaign, that’s fine, good luck to you. But I have a very clear message for anyone using the southern border for staged political events: Don’t come to Arizona. Take your political theater to Texas,” she said on the Senate floor.
SOME REPUBLICANS IN ARIZONA continue to hope Sinema runs, because they are nervous enough about Lake that they recently tried to lure former Gov. Doug Ducey into the Senate race, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Lake, a television anchor turned election-denier MAGA candidate, told “McCain Republicans” they should “get the hell out” of a campaign event during her failed gubernatorial bid in 2022. She never conceded her loss, has filed multiple lawsuits, and has continued to piss off Republicans.
Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, whose office maintains voting records for the county, sued Lake for defamation, a case which she tried, and failed, to have thrown out. Richer wrote that Lake’s lies accusing him of election rigging have forced him to invest in security to protect him from death threats Lake’s followers have made and that he has “even lost friends and lifelong relationships because Lake has falsely painted me as a criminal.”
Lake recently alarmed some Arizona Republicans, as the Journal recounts, when she revealed she had recorded the state party chairman asking her not to run and offering her a gig or some cash in return. Jeff DeWit said Lake had edited the tape, but he was then forced out of his job. On the way out he released a statement saying he had worried about Lake’s “limited appeal with moderates and independents, and her being a drag on the entire ticket.” Lake faced a backlash for the scandal when she was booed at a state party gathering in Phoenix last month.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee has endorsed Lake, despite her problems, over another contender—Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, who is a “Stop the Steal” nutter. Concerned by surveys showing that Sinema was taking twice as many GOP votes as Democratic votes, the NRSC ran an ad in November attacking both Sinema and Gallego, painting Sinema as a liberal who voted with Biden 100 percent of the time in an effort to divide Democratic voters.
While Lake will have to spew the Big Lie and remain Kraken Kari through the August primary, Gallego—a Marine and Iraq War veteran—can present as the moderate candidate to the swing voters there who are familiar with Lake and have rejected MAGA and election lies repeatedly in recent cycles. The Arizona GOP is deeply divided, so Gallego has plenty to work with here. And Lake as a liability is a problem for Trump.
Lake is so strapped for cash that she was recently hosted at a fundraiser by some QAnon supporters. So if Sinema retires, Lake will be eager to court the GOP donors who have been supporting the senator.
But if Sinema runs again, Lake will make an issue of Sinema’s campaign expenditures. Her spending would likely be a huge issue in a campaign this year.
Since 2020, Sinema has spent more than $210,000 in taxpayer dollars on private plane travel. According to the Daily Beast, in 2023, Sinema took trips to Europe, staying in swanky hotels in Madrid and Paris, and to multiple wineries in California and Oregon. She also spends more than $100,000 per month on personal security—more than $630,000 in just six months. Much of her spending on security has gone to Vrindavan Bellord, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard’s sister, who runs TOA Group LLC, a firm that has received $1.2 million in total from Sinema’s Getting Stuff Done PAC and campaign since March 2022. “Because the payments to Bellord are aggregated into large lump sums—and not reported out separately and specifically, as is the typical FEC standard—it is extremely difficult to ascertain exactly what Sinema’s campaign funds are being spent on,” the Daily Beast wrote.
Sinema was a cosponsor of the NOPE Act in 2017 (No Ongoing Perks Enrichment Act) which aimed to “prohibit the use of funds provided for the official travel expenses of Members of Congress and other officers and employees of the legislative branch for first-class airline accommodations,” so—as they say—the ads write themselves.
Sinema dodged the question of whether she would campaign again when she spoke to Robert Draper for a profile in the New York Times last year. Perhaps by last spring, dashing about on private jets to luxury resorts, she had already decided not to run again. When Draper asked her about the seeming contradiction between her “unorthodox character” and her reputation as a Senate institutionalist, Sinema’s response was: “You’re mistaking someone who’s not interested in marching to someone else’s drum or following their rules, which are petty and dumb, as being somehow incompatible with wanting to preserve and protect the fundamentals of our democracy.”
Sinema has done a lot for democracy, she has made government work. Helping Lake become a U.S. senator would be terrible for democracy. And private equity opportunities and wine tours await. Sinema should retire now and beat Nikki Haley to all the best job offers.
There are normally 535 members of Congress—435 representatives and 100 senators—but there are four vacancies in the House as of this writing, a fact that has only added to the uncertainty and chaos in that chamber.