There’s only one way to take Kyrsten Sinema down in 2022

| 5:00 pm EDT September 26, 2022
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Kyrsten Sinema is toast in 2024. She’s become so unpopular with Democratic voters, she’ll lose her Senate seat in a Democratic primary challenge and won’t even make it to the general election. But in the meantime we must work our tails off to expand the Democratic Senate to 52 seats in the 2022 midterms and make Sinema irrelevant until she’s gone.

There’s this notion that Sinema corruptly knows what she’s doing. She does not. Her numbers in Arizona are now bad across the board. And even if she were popular with Republican voters – which she’s not, but even if she were – she’ll still lose a Democratic primary challenge.

Joe Manchin, a corrupt Democrat in a red state, knows what he’s doing. He knows he’s not going to lose a Democratic primary challenge from his left in a state like West Virginia, and he knows that his red state’s general election voters like the way he’s been playing both sides. Sinema is trying to copy Manchin’s red state Democrat strategy in the purple state of Arizona, which is idiotic even from a villain standpoint.

If Sinema’s goal is just to line her pockets at the expense of her career and just retire in 2024, then so be it. But there are also smarter ways to do that. The point of being a corrupt politician is to keep your seat while lining your pockets, so you can continue lining your pockets. Sinema’s new best friend Mitch McConnell, for instance, spends each election cycle getting away with precisely what he thinks will allow him to keep getting reelected. It’s what’s allowed McConnell to keep his seat, and thus keep grifting, for four decades. Sinema doesn’t appear to understand how the game works.

Even from a villain standpoint, Sinema is being a moron. Her increasingly aloof and borderline bizarre public behavior suggests some degree of mental incompetence. That doesn’t excuse her corruption. But can we stop pretending she knows what she’s doing? She’s lost her marbles, and McConnell is playing her.

“But she’ll just become a Republican and win reelection that way!”

Nothing is that magically simple. There are reasons why she’d never be able to pull that off. But it’s possible McConnell has sold her on that fantasy. She’s an idiot, and it’s something an idiot would believe.

In any case, we can’t get rid of her for another two years. But we can spend the next six weeks putting in the work to expand our Senate majority and make her irrelevant.

Some folks on our side would rather just sit around and whine about Sinema so they can feel outrage. But that makes them as useless as she is. It’s how you lose. So let’s not do that. Let’s get to work and expand our majority to 52 seats. We have six weeks to go. Every day counts!