![]() While her new stepfather struggled to find work, they settled across the street from relatives, in a cinder-block building that had once been a gas station she said they subsisted with help from members of the LDS church to which they belonged. Born in Tucson, she moved with her family when she was 8 to a rural community in the Florida panhandle after her parents divorced. The hardships Sinema faced growing up have long formed the foundational story of her politics. Sinema had become a stickler for the rules. ![]() Her issue, she said, was that the wage increase had nothing to do with Covid relief. While critics called her a hypocrite and pointed to comments in which she had previously endorsed a higher wage, Sinema insisted she still did support an increase. “I understand what it is like to face tough choices while working to meet your family’s most basic needs,” she said in a statement. When Sinema tried to explain why she opposed the minimum-wage hike, she began, as she often does, with a nod to her past. The future of the party and the Senate just might hinge on what Kyrsten Sinema wants to do with it. Now, for the first time in her career, she holds real power. But her success was also powered by an army of activists-outsiders like she had once been-operating on a far different theory of change. She learned to play nice, seeking incremental progress through careful messaging and across-the-aisle relationships, and reinventing herself as a post-partisan deal-maker. As a progressive in one of the nation’s most conservative state legislatures, Sinema abandoned her early radicalism for a new theory of change. From her family’s struggle with poverty during her childhood to her Green Party roots, her rise is the story of striving and adaptation, and of the transformation not just of an idealist, but of a state-from a Republican stronghold she once dubbed the “meth lab of democracy” to a bona fide battleground.īut in the process, Sinema has left some back home wondering whether she’s misread the lessons of her own ascent. Long before she became one of the Democratic caucus’s most centrist members, Sinema was so liberal she refused to even join the party. But to those who have supported Sinema from the beginning of her career, her heel-turn is more painful. In the face of united Republican opposition, many Democrats feared such a standard would doom almost every piece of their agenda-from immigration reform to voting rights to LGBTQ equality.ĭemocrats expected such intransigence from West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, a conservative from a state Donald Trump carried by 39 points, who once shot climate legislation with a gun and whose wife cuts his hair with a Flowbee. Weeks earlier, Sinema, who rarely speaks to reporters from news outlets that are not based in her home state, had drawn a sharp line during an interview with Politico: “I want to restore the 60-vote threshold for all elements of the Senate’s work,” she said. More alarming was her opposition to reforming the filibuster, the Senate rule that allows a minority of senators to block a piece of legislation from coming to a vote. To Sinema’s progressive critics, her vote was a funhouse mirror image of John McCain’s thumbs-down vote to save the Affordable Care Act four years earlier-only now an Arizona Democrat was rejecting one of her party’s biggest legislative priorities.
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