Progressive revolt against Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema is exactly why Trump will win (again)
A group of Arizona Democrats are demonstrating why President Donald Trump will more than likely be a two-term president.
The party’s liberal wing simply cannot resist the temptation to shoot itself in its Birkenstocks.
Witness the liberals riding in on their unicorn, hoping to censure the first Arizona Democrat elected to the U.S. Senate in 30 years.
It seems Sen. Kyrsten Sinema is just not Democratic enough. So the party's progressive caucus is asked the Arizona Democratic Party to censure her on Saturday. The party has decided to push the vote to its annual meeting in January.
“We really support Kyrsten Sinema, we want her to succeed, we want her to be the best senator in the country,” Dan O’Neal, state coordinator for Progressive Democrats of America, told The Republic’s Yvonne Wingett Sanchez. “But the way she is voting is really disappointing. We want Democrats to vote like Democrats and not Republicans.”
Sinema won because she's a centrist
The problem is, that’s not what the people who decided last year’s Senate race — the ones who quite likely will decide next year’s presidential race — want.
Sinema won last year because she ran as a centrist, one who could appeal to moderates who are sick to death of the long-running, never-ending trench war between the Republican and Democratic parties.
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She won GOP-rich Maricopa County, as moderates saw in Sinema someone who would abandon the fox holes and go in search of that rare earth called middle ground.
But the progressives complain she’s too quick to throw in with Republicans. They cite her vote to confirm William Barr to be U.S. attorney, among other things.
Indeed, Sinema was one of three Democrats to vote for Barr’s confirmation.
But she also has voted against Trump’s positions 81% percent of the time this year, according to the FiveThirtyEight Trump Tracker.
In June, she voted yes on a bill to provide $4.5 billion in emergency humanitarian aid to migrants on the U.S-Mexico border. In March, she voted to block Trump from declaring a national emergency in order to divert funds on the border wall.
This is no way for Democrats to win
During last year’s campaign, Sinema made no secret of her desire to be seen as independent. She’s more pragmatist than party loyalist.
That was the secret sauce that allowed her to defeat Martha McSally, who hopped into Donald Trump's hip pocket on the day she announced for the Senate.
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Rather than taking a lesson from Sinema’s success, the Democratic Party nationally seems determined to do a reverse-McSally, embracing candidates who have pushed even its centrist candidates to the left.
Removing criminal penalties for illegal immigration, Medicare for all, the Green New Deal, free college, free child care, mandatory gun buybacks, slave reparations and impeachment impeachment impeachment.
Democrats seem determined to hurtle left, right over the cliff.
Just don’t expect Kyrsten Sinema to follow them.
Laurie Roberts is a columnist for the Arizona Republic, where this column originally appeared. Follow her on Twitter @LaurieRoberts.
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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Push to censure centrists like Kyrsten Sinema will hand 2020 to Trump
