by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona, the Democrat-turned-independent who struck bipartisan deals that cemented parts of President Biden’s agenda but also hampered some of her former party’s top priorities, said Tuesday she would not seek re-election.
His announcement ended a year of speculation about his future in a politically competitive state. He cleared the field for a traditional duel in the high-stakes battle for control of the Senate, between a more conventional Democrat, Rep. Rubén Gallego, and the eventual Republican nominee.
“Because I choose civility, understanding, listening and working together to get things done, I will be leaving the Senate at the end of this year,” he said in a video announcement.
Sinema, a first-term senator who left the Democratic Party in 2022, faced potentially long odds in a three-way race for re-election as Democrats fight to maintain control of the Senate. Recent polls found her trailing Gallego and Kari Lake, the front-runner for the Republican nomination who is an acolyte of former President Donald J. Trump and has defended her baseless claims of voter fraud.
His decision to retire now has led to a more direct confrontation, likely between Gallego and Lake, although Mark Lamb, a sheriff, is also seeking the Republican nomination.
Sen. Steve Daines of Montana, who heads the Senate Republican campaign committee, argued that Sinema’s decision not to run would boost Lake, who has the backing of his National Republican Senatorial Committee.
“With recent polls showing that Kyrsten Sinema attracts many more Republican voters than Democrats, her decision to retire improves Kari Lake’s chance of flipping this seat,” Daines said in a statement.
But Stan Barnes, a former Republican lawmaker and lobbyist for Copper State Consulting Group, a Phoenix-based firm, said the advantage would go to Democrats, whose votes might otherwise have been split between Sinema and Gallego.
“When it comes to the US Senate in Arizona, Democrats are mostly unified and Republicans are decidedly fractured,” Barnes said. “This means: Galician advantage.”
In a statement, Gallego focused on criticizing Lake while also thanking Sinema for her service to Arizona.
“Democrats, independents and Republicans alike are coming together and rejecting Kari Lake and her dangerous positions,” he said.
Ms. Lake, who was in Washington on Tuesday for a fundraiser, spoke at length to reporters on Capitol Hill, seeking to praise Ms. Sinema and saying that the senator’s exit from the race may make her own candidacy be “a little easier.” .”
“I respect Kyrsten Sinema as a human being,” Lake said. “While I disagree with her on almost all of her policies, I very much appreciate the courage she showed when it came to protecting the filibuster.”
Sinema continued to align herself with Democrats after leaving the party, keeping her committee seats and providing swing votes for key parts of Biden’s agenda. She supported Democrats on most social policies and supported Biden’s judicial nominees. But he also angered leaders of his former party by opposing major Democratic priorities, including efforts to raise taxes on corporations and attempts to weaken the filibuster to push important election laws, among other policies.
In a statement Tuesday, Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the majority leader, said Sinema had “blazed a trail of achievement in the Senate,” citing her work on Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act. its main infrastructure law. and a law requiring federal recognition of same-sex marriages.
Sinema took pride in her relationships with centrist Republicans. She played a key role in brokering a groundbreaking bipartisan package earlier this year to curb migration across the U.S. border with Mexico while providing new aid to Ukraine and other U.S. allies, a project bill that Republicans demanded and then quickly failed.
In the wake of his disappearance, Sinema appeared disillusioned and angry, having seen some of the Republicans he had worked closely with to close the deal quickly turn against him.
“It turns out they want all talk and no action,” he said of Republicans in a scathing speech on the Senate floor just before the package failed. “It turns out that border security is not actually a risk to our national security; “It’s just a talking point for the elections.”
“When we work together, we can solve problems,” he later added. “We did that here. And you decided not to.”
In her statement Tuesday, she emphasized how frustrated she had become about the state of American politics.
“These solutions are considered failures, either because there are too many of them or because they are not enough,” Ms. Sinema said, adding: “Compromise is a bad word. We have come to that crossroads and we choose anger and division. “I believe in my approach, but it is not what America wants right now.”
After winning a close race in 2018 over Martha McSally, a Republican, to become Arizona’s first elected senator, Sinema has had an eventful tenure in Washington as an enigmatic figure who often kept her colleagues guessing about her intentions. and challenged conventions.
His emphatic rejection of a 2021 effort to raise the minimum wage angered progressives; protesters have chased her through airports; and activists have criticized what they say is her eagerness to side with business interests over campaign promises she made to Arizona voters. Arizona Democrats censured her after she refused to agree to change filibuster rules to pass voting rights legislation.
Ms. Sinema’s decision to step aside effectively eliminates the last remaining Democratic-aligned member of the Senate who opposes changing the filibuster, after Sen. Joe Manchin III, the conservative-leaning West Virginia Democrat, announced in the fall that he would not seek re-election.
As the deadline for Ms. Sinema to declare her re-election campaign approached in recent months, rumors emerged in Arizona about whether she would do so. Text messages from friends of hers and some moderate Republicans who were eager to endorse her went unanswered or ignored, leading many to speculate that she would ultimately choose not to run.
Without the support of the Democratic base, Sinema would have faced an extraordinarily uphill path to re-election, one in which she likely would have needed to cobble together a coalition of moderate Democrats, anti-Trump Republicans and unaffiliated independent voters.
She also faced a daunting deadline: To run as an independent candidate, she needed to submit more than 42,000 valid signatures by April 1, a costly and time-consuming task even for a candidate with $10.6 million available, such as Ms. Sinema reported in Recent Presentations on Campaign Finance.
He never filed a declaration of interest with the Secretary of State’s office, a necessary step before beginning to gather signatures.
Robert Jimison contributed reports.
