Dems crazy to consider ousting Sinema

Well, it didn’t take long for Democrats to start dining on their own flesh.

It seems some in the party’s progressive wing are unhappy that Arizona Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is doing … exactly what she said she’d do all along.

So unhappy, in fact, that they’re threatening to launch a multi-million campaign to oust her in the 2024 Democratic primary.

Politico reports the operatives — a trio of progressives who helped launch Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s congressional career in 2018 — have formed a new group called No Excuses PAC to target Sinema and West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin.

The two moderate Democrats are drawing fire from their own party because they’re opposed to ending the filibuster. Without their support, President Joe Biden can kiss goodbye any hope he has of getting his agenda on COVID-19, immigration or much of anything else passed without Republican support.

In response, the No Excuses crowd already is looking to oust them.

Politico reports the three Democratic operatives are preparing to launch a search for someone to primary Sinema and Manchin, confident they can raise “many, many millions of dollars” to unseat them if they don’t agree to toe the party line and end the filibuster.

“Help us find the next AOC to replace Manchin and Sinema,” the PAC wrote, in an email to be sent out to supporters on Tuesday.

The next AOC?

Excuse me, but have the No Excuses people actually been to Arizona?

Granted, the state is changing. In the span of two years, this once rubyred state has elected two Democrats to the Senate and voted for a Democratic presidential candidate for only the second time since 1952.

But that’s more of a factor of Donald Trump and his ability to turn off moderates than it is any sudden lurch to the far left. (And even then, Biden won Arizona by a margin of just 0.3%.)

In 2018, Sinema defeated a Republican candidate whose slavish devotion to Trump was a turnoff to moderate Republicans and GOP-leaning independents. Then that same flawed candidate, Martha McSally, was appointed to fill a vacancy and proceeded to lose it to Democrat Mark Kelly in 2020.

Democrats worked tirelessly to get both Sinema and Kelly elected, but they didn’t do it alone.

In Sinema’s case, she won because independent and moderate Republicans revolted, many of them collegeeducated suburban women with buyer’s remorse over their 2016 votes for Trump.

Sinema won 118 reliably red precincts in Arizona, precincts that in 2016 supported Trump and in 2018

supported Republican Gov. Doug Ducey but rejected McSally. Of those, 88 precincts were in Maricopa County, the state’s largest county and the one that decided the race … in Sinema’s favor.

Sinema never campaigned as a progressive and in fact, positions herself as a moderate who is independent of either party. I don’t know if that’s where her heart lies but she certainly knows that’s where her best chance at re-election lies.

Kelly must believe it as well because he followed Sinema’s playbook right into a Senate seat of his own. (Kelly, by the way, has been silent on his view of the filibuster and no doubt, he’ll remain so until forced to take a position.)

It seems inevitable that Arizona eventually will turn some shade of blue. Time and demographics are their friend and Republicans seem to be doing all they can to hasten the change.

But it’s worth remembering that while Biden and Kelly won Arizona in 2020, Democrats couldn’t manage to grab a single seat in the state House, allowing Republicans to maintain their one-vote edge.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. Democrats targeted several vulnerable Republicans with big-money legislative campaigns, but all they got was a lousy T-shirt that said, “Better luck next time”.

And East Coast Democrats are surprised that Sinema is holding true to her campaign pledge to work with folks across the aisle? (Even if said folks have no intention of returning the favor.)

Again, I ask. Have you people actually been to Arizona?

“The only real way to pressure any of these folks and hold them accountable to their promises is to threaten their power, and threaten the seat that they hold and threaten their re-election,” No Excuses PAC co-founder Saikat Chakrabarti, a former chief-of-staff to OcasioCortez, told Politico.

“We sort of have this theory that the voters in Arizona and the voters in West Virginia would care more about action, they care more about jobs and their community and money in their pockets than they do about an arcane Senate rule called the filibuster.”

Chakrabarti, along with his partners Zach Exley and Corbin Trent, recruited Ocasio-Cortez to run for Congress in 2018. As co-founders of Justice Democrats, they have recruited progressive candidates and helped oust a handful of House Democrats in recent years.

Cue Politico:

“Their new project’s goal is to ‘shock’ Manchin and Sinema ‘into seeing reality’ and ‘how angry Democratic primary voters are going to be’ if they continue to support the filibuster.”

Soooo, they’ll wrangle up a liberal to challenge Sinema in the 2024 primary. They want to knock off the first Arizona Democrat to actually win a seat in the Senate in 30 years.

Is that Republicans I hear laughing their heads off?