Dana Bash: "Does she [Kyrsten Sinema] have the guts to take on special interests?"

Bernie Sanders: "No, she doesn't. She's a corporate Democrat!" pic.twitter.com/WaNtYROWLc

— HalalFlow (@halalflow) December 12, 2022

Looks like twitter has really chased off a lot of folks. I don’t see even one quarter of the news that I did last week. It’s all about Musk today and ads.

The Key to Understanding Krysten Sinema is that it is always about Krysten Sinema

Kyrsten Sinema’s done it again. The Arizona senator has a habit of forcing herself into the national spotlight, often for less than inspiring reasons, and her recent announcement that she’s officially leaving the Democratic Party and becoming an independent has predictably set the proverbial discourse alight.

Sinema’s announcement has, to a point, been a long time coming. The Arizona crony capitalist, after all, made her career by presenting herself as a sensible, middle-of-the-road voice, representing the proverbial forgotten moderate American sick of the partisan game-playing in Washington ― and spent the past two years reveling in frustrating her own party’s ambitions, seemingly aping the political strategy of her “personal hero” John McCain, whose Senate seat she currently sits in.

The reality is that this was the best thing Sinema could do to ensure her continued political survival. Sinema has managed the feat of holding on to Democratic support even as she’s behaved as a corporate shill and generally pissed off her own voters by using a standard bit of political blackmail: sure, you may not like the way she votes or her opposition to the Democratic agenda, but in a less-than-solidly-Democratic state like Arizona, she’s the best you were going to get. Would you rather a Republican hold the seat?

This was what drove the past two years of behavior that’s infuriated Democrats, including those from her own state, where increasingly incensed progressives — some of whom spent time and effort working to get her elected — have grown more vocal about challenging her next time she’s up for reelection. As a way of showcasing her independence, Sinema’s made a big show of often gratuitously serving as a roadblock to her party’s ambitions.

This strategy isn’t particularly novel, but it is effective, as long as voters have no inkling that your basic case — “I’m the best you’re going to get, so quit whining and just vote for me” — has little behind it. The trouble for Sinema is that Arizona has had two Democratic senators these past couple years, and that other Democrat, Mark Kelly, has just won reelection in the purple state by very different means.

While hardly a progressive, Kelly has been a loyal Democrat, voting with the president 95 percent of the time and standing fully behind the Build Back Better bill, the centerpiece of the Democratic agenda — even as he’s made a show of breaking with the administration on other, comparatively minor matters. It suggests that Sinema’s strategy of establishing herself in the public imagination as the chief Democratic obstacle to her own president’s ambitions was entirely unnecessary, an impression only given more legs by loyal Democrat Raphael Warnock’s recent reelection win in the similarly purple state of Georgia.

In other words, before this move, there was more than a good chance Sinema could fall to a Democratic primary challenge come 2024, since Kelly’s win had obliterated the rationale of the electoral blackmail that would have forced Democratic voters to hold their nose and support her. By going independent, Sinema is now embarking on a different, somewhat more aggressive bit of blackmail, making it clear to the party that she’ll happily put a Republican in office by splitting the vote in a three-way race if they run a Democratic challenger against her.

But Sinema could prove a victim of her own success. Having spent the past few years working hard to convince voters that there was little difference between her and a typical Republican, getting a Republican elected may well be a risk that Arizona progressives are now willing to take.

Democrats Don’t Have to Settle for Battling to a Draw

The election results surprised many pundits and Republicans, but not those who were following the surveys conducted by Democracy Corps and the articles I wrote for the Prospect. They showed the Democrats with a small lead in the generic House vote in September. That slipped to a tie and 2-point deficit with October’s likely voters. With 107 million votes counted, Democrats are losing the House by a 3-point margin. The surveys showed the potential for African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians to disappoint those looking for an engaged base.

The very low turnout of African Americans and Hispanics was not surprising and likely cost us a greater Senate majority (one that might have been willing to get rid of the filibuster) and House control.

Many were relieved that Democrats defied history. I was angry.

We are at a moment where Democrats have a policy offer that makes lives appreciably better. Republicans just decry inflation and Democrats. They plant powerful cultural bombs that leave Democrats badly damaged on crime, the border, and love of country.

I was angry because in this campaign the White House was just cheerleading over a “strong economy,” and some leaders gave this message: Re-elect us because we accomplished so much. Instead, they could have shown sympathy on income and the cost of living, pushed back against corporate power, neutralized the crime issue, and grown their numbers.

Over 70 percent of eligible voters do not have a four-year degree, my measure of working-class. And in this midterm election, they were 61 percent of the voters. Over 80 percent of the Black and Hispanic voters were working-class, though that is usually closer to 70 percent in our campaign surveys.

And those voters were mad as hell about the economy. Two-thirds rated it “negatively” in my survey for Democracy Corps and PSG Consulting with 2,000 pre-election and Election Day voters. Two-thirds of voters said the country was on the wrong track. They were also mad as hell about the billions in campaign spending that corrupted politics. They are conscious that the biggest corporations, high-tech companies, and billionaires use their money and lobbyists to rig the game against working people.

They are mad as hell because they really haven’t seen a pay raise in two decades, which is even more true for African Americans and Hispanics. Their frustration was heightened by two decades of spiking growth in incomes and wealth for the top 1 percent and spiking spending on political campaigns.

The economy was the top issue for voters in 2016, 2018, 2020, and 2022, of course. This year, maddening inflation stole away any marginal gain in wages. Everywhere in the world, working people are on a desperate edge, and the top issue is the cost of living and what governments are doing to help them.

And in this election, it was the top issue by far for the Democrats’ diverse working-class base of African Americans, Hispanics, millennials, and unmarried women.

Do you think they heard anything from the national Democrats that would have stirred them to get out to vote?

The article is very long, so an excerpt is provided. I can’t say enough that Bernie likely has paid heed to those words.

Brett Kavanaugh attended a private holiday party on Friday night at the home of CPAC chairman Matt Schlapp, and that attendees included Stephen Miller, whose group America First Legal Foundation has interests in cases now pending before the Supreme Court https://t.co/2Nw29CoMFO

— Citizens for Ethics (@CREWcrew) December 12, 2022

The White House is whipping against Bernie Sanders Yemen war powers resolution, urging a no vote this evening, sources involved tell me https://t.co/SfftPmSK3c pic.twitter.com/AX73LUbHlf

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) December 13, 2022

Bernie showed up for railroad workers at our nation’s Capital today! pic.twitter.com/P3r9zuiaIt

— Ross Grooters (@RossGrooters) December 13, 2022