So that’s definitely different than the approach she takes today.”Īs Sinema climbed the ranks into state Democratic leadership, she also learned the art of compromise so well that it began to concern some of her progressive allies and former liberal champions. “If you look at our campaign materials during those years, we ran on a progressive platform and the bills we introduced are pretty progressive. “We were very much a progressive team,” he says. She interviewed him first to ensure he was sufficiently progressive - an irony that’s not lost on him now. But the first time they met in 2004, she was hesitant to team up with him because he had once been registered as a Republican. But two years later, after adopting the label of Democrat and getting the nod from her new party, she won a seat in the Arizona House of Representatives.įor the next six years, she served in the state House representing the same Downtown Phoenix district as David Lujan, an era that culminated with him as House minority leader and her as assistant leader. But the details of Sinema’s transformation lay in her time in the state legislature, where she learned to distance herself from progressives and made alliances with Republicans that she still leans on today.īack in 2002, the Arizona Democratic Party deemed Sinema “too extreme” for the Arizona Legislature in her bid as a lefty independent candidate. The broad outline of Sinema’s metamorphosis is well-known: A former Green Party activist who protested the Iraq War in a pink tutu, she shifted toward the center as she set her sights on Congress.
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Some of her old comrades say Sinema would be better off dropping the ‘D’ next to her name altogether and returning to her roots as an independent.īut for those still perplexed about Sinema, her rise offers an object lesson in how to get ahead by flagrantly eschewing loyalty to one’s own party. Progressive activists are furious, with local groups already threatening to fund a primary challenge against her in 2024.
She voted against Donald Trump’s massive tax cuts but now refuses to raise tax rates on the wealthy and corporations she says tackling climate change is a top priority but reportedly suggested slashing billions of climate dollars in Democrats’ sweeping social spending package (something her office denies). What exactly Sinema stands for appears to be less important. “She’s usually the smartest person in the room and she wants to be treated that way,” says Phil Lopes, a former Democratic colleague in the state House of Representatives, who was once a Sinema ally, but no longer. Sinema declined to comment for this report. But in Arizona, many people see those positions as almost beside the point: For them, Sinema is better understood in terms of pure ambition, and the constant triangulation needed to hold office in a purple state that fancies itself charting an independent course, whatever that requires in the moment. Politically, Sinema’s career looks like she experienced a personal revolution she began as a left-wing agitator and ended up as a Republican-friendly moderate. Back home, some of her oldest allies - as well as critics - have an insight for the Democrats who are trying to corral her, and it’s not necessarily a comfortable one: Get used to it.