 | | Kyrsten Sinema is at the center of Democratic infighting over President Biden's social policy agenda.Sarahbeth Maney/The New York Times |
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At the time, Sinema, then a three-term congresswoman, was the leading Democrat for the state's Senate seat being vacated by Jeff Flake, a Republican. She was handpicked by Chuck Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader, for her fund-raising acumen and a carefully curated moderate image that was believed to play well in Arizona, which hadn't elected a Democrat to the Senate in 30 years. |
Before flying to Phoenix, I asked Sinema's aides whether she would be doing any campaigning or whether I could come see her — it was a week of congressional recess when members of Congress tend to spend time in their districts. |
After obfuscating about her whereabouts, Sinema's team finally told me to meet her at a bookstore in Phoenix for what was described as a round-table discussion with local businesswomen. When I got there, I encountered a highly unusual scene for a major campaign. |
There was nobody else at the event, just the seven businesswomen, Sinema and her highly attentive staff (one aide unwrapped a straw before carefully placing it in Sinema's can of La Croix), me and a small CNN crew. |
She spent the 38-minute discussion — seemingly conducted purely for the benefit of The Wall Street Journal, where I worked at the time, and CNN — taking every opportunity to praise President Donald J. Trump and her meetings with him. When she was asked about child care, she said Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump was working on it. |
In our subsequent 13-minute interview, Sinema couldn't name any topics in which she disagreed with Trump. When I asked what her younger self, who worked for Ralph Nader's presidential campaign, would think of her in 2018, she said she would be "proud of the growth." |
And she wouldn't say whether she had given up on her former, more liberal beliefs, but she stressed that she had prioritized results over rhetoric. |
"What I've learned to do is use the tools and skills that I've learned to be productive and get stuff done," she told me. "Getting stuff done is amazing. It's amazing when you can say, 'I've delivered real results.'" |
What is perhaps most notable about that interview is that she did it at all. Sinema rarely granted requests for sit-down interviews with national reporters during the rest of her 2018 campaign. Since coming to Washington, she has been one of the most elusive senators on Capitol Hill. |
Ian Danley, the executive director of Arizona Wins, a coalition of 32 progressive advocacy organizations, said his group had registered nearly 200,000 new voters and knocked on more than two million doors in support of Sinema's 2018 campaign. She has not once met with his group or its partners since taking office in 2019, he said. |
That, Danley said, prompted the frustration that led to the viral ambushing of Sinema over the weekend in a bathroom at Arizona State University, where she teaches classes on social work and fund-raising. Activists from Living United for Change in Arizona, one of the groups in the Arizona Wins coalition, pressed Sinema to support the $3.5 billion Democratic legislation that would expand the social safety net. |
"What's she supposed to do, she asked for a meeting — they tried to go meet with the staff and the senator, that doesn't happen," Danley said. "That's a breakdown of constituent services, a breakdown of leadership — that's not the fault of young people who are trying to lobby and influence their elected officials." |
What happens next with Sinema is anyone's guess. Unlike Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, her fellow Democratic holdout on Biden's legislation, Sinema hasn't publicly articulated what she wants from the negotiations, a development that got her skewered on the latest episode of "Saturday Night Live." |
Perhaps the thing to know about Sinema is how she views her own political metamorphosis. After beginning her career so far on the liberal end of politics that she refused to take campaign contributions ("that's bribery," she said while running for the Phoenix City Council in 2001) and wrote letters to the Arizona Republic condemning the very idea of capitalism, Sinema has gone to great lengths to define herself as the opposite of what she was before. |
"When I was young, I was passionate and excited and energized and wanted to help people in my community and change the world," she told me in the 2018 interview. "What I've figured out is when you're willing to work with people, even those with whom you sometimes disagree, when you work with people who are different from yourself, you can find common areas of agreement and achieve good things." |
Sinema has finally swung so far around that the people she used to disagree with are now her allies. Her old allies, who now disagree with her, no longer have any hope she'll work with them. |
 | | Half of Michigan's voting population lives in the type of midsize and small manufacturing communities that the report focused on.Spencer Platt/Getty Images |
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Democrats lost the most in Midwestern 'factory towns,' a new report said. |
The share of the Democratic presidential vote in the Midwest declined most precipitously between 2012 and 2020 in counties that experienced the steepest losses in manufacturing and union jobs and saw declines in health care, according to a new report to be released this month. |
The party's worsening performance in the region's midsize communities — often overlooked places like Chippewa Falls, Wis., and Bay City, Mich. — poses a dire threat to Democrats, the report warns. |
"We cannot elect Democrats up and down the ballot, let alone protect our governing majorities, if we don't address those losses," wrote Richard J. Martin, an Iowa-based market researcher and Democratic campaign veteran, in the report titled "Factory Towns." |
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