While national Democrats, including Pres. Biden, struggle with AZ Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's positions in an evenly-divided Senate, progressives at home are launching campaigns to pressure the state's senior senator, threatening a primary challenger in 2024.
Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, D-Ariz., has fired back after she was confronted on camera going into a school bathroom over the weekend by a group of pro-Biden agenda activists.While national Democrats, including President Joe Biden, struggle with Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's positions in an evenly-divided Senate, progressives at home are launching campaigns to pressure the state's senior senator, threatening a primary challenger in 2024.
Progressives are expressing frustration with Sinema, who they say is working against an already moderate president and making Democratic priorities more difficult to enact. And activists are ramping up the pressure on her with crowdfunding campaigns and protests, even following her into a bathroom while she was home in Arizona last week, an action widely condemned by leaders on both sides of the aisle.
Kai Newkirk, a progressive organizer who helped elect Sinema in 2018, is a part of the effort to pressure Sinema to fall in line with Biden's agenda in the Senate by using one of the new political action committees to send a clear message: Move out of the way so Biden's agenda can pass, or else Democrats will look elsewhere for a 2024 Senate nominee. He and other activists started ato fund a primary challenger to Sinema, which raised $100,000 in a week.
Some of the dissatisfaction with Sinema comes from a lack of clarity on what exactly she wants. She initially ran for the state House in the 2000s as an independent and pushed for progressive agendas. As her political career developed and she gained larger constituencies, she's continued to move to the center. Now, in the Senate majority for the first time, she's been in and out of meetings with the White House and, along with West Virginia Sen.
"She's not explaining what she's doing or where she really stands to her constituents. And it's absurd and insulting….feeling that she doesn't even have to explain to the people who elected her -- that she's there to represent -- where she stands on these specific issues," Newkirk said. "Even among the Democrats, we tend to see a little more right-leaning issue positions and preferences for centrism and moderate candidates than what we tend to see nationally. In fact, I would say Kyrsten Sinema largely was elected thanks to that," she added.
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