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Upon learning that the Arizona senator Kyrsten Sinema was leaving their party, some Democrats’ reactions could best be summed up with two words: good riddance.
The lawmaker has been a thorn in their side since the early days of Joe Biden’s presidency, snarling negotiations over the White House’s priorities and voting down reforms dear to progressives such as raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, and reforming the Senate filibuster.
“Senator Sinema may now be registered as an Independent, but she has shown she answers to corporations and billionaires, not Arizonans. Senator Sinema’s party registration means nothing if she continues to not listen to her constituents,” the state’s Democratic party chair, Raquel Terán, said in a statement.
Yet, much like Joe Manchin, the centrist West Virginia senator who has played a similar spoiler role over the past two years, Sinema has come through for her fellow Democrats in many key areas, supporting Biden’s policy positions 93% of the time, according to the political aggregator FiveThirtyEight.
Whether she will continue to offer that help for the next two years is up in the air, after announcing on Friday she had left the party and registered as an independent, a decision that brought to the surface many Democrats’ bitterness towards the first-term lawmaker.
The announcement rocked the party, which had been on something of a roll over the past weeks. On Tuesday, they succeeded in getting every single one of their senators re-elected for the first time since 1934 after Raphael Warnock won his seat in Georgia, and last month only narrowly lost the House of Representatives in the midterm elections.
After spending two years navigating a fraught 50-50 Senate split in which the vice-president, Kamala Harris, came in to break tie votes, they won a new seat in Pennsylvania, and were planning to take outright control of Congress’s upper chamber.
Sinema was vague about the degree to which she would continue to cooperate with the Democrats.
