When Senator Kyrsten Sinema, of Arizona, announced, last week, that she was leaving the Democratic Party, it wasn’t exactly a surprise˳ Sinema had repeatedly split with Democrats on key political issues˳ Last year, she helped to kill a Party-backed fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage and, this August, she blocked the repeal of the carried-interest tax exemption, which benefits venture-capital, hedge-fund, and private-equity principals˳ She was also a bit of a loner personally: she reportedly rarely attended the Party’s weekly lunch meetings and, according to Politico, preferred to ride the Senate elevator alone˳ A Biden White House aide “characterized her as difficult and contrarian” to the Times, last week˳
Because Sinema is an oddball, and because her statements about leaving the Democratic Party emphasized bipartisan truisms (“When politicians are more focused on denying the opposition party a victory than they are on improving Americans’ lives, the people who lose are everyday Americans”) rather than anything like a principled grievance, her break was generally taken as, basically, a change in mood˳ “This is who she’s always been,” Michelle Goldberg wrote, with nice acidity, in the Times˳ “The content of Sinema’s politics has changed over time, from Green Party progressivism to pro-corporate centrism˳ Her approach to elected office as a vehicle for the refinement of the self has not˳” There were also reasons to think that political opportunism was at work: there is an active and well-funded campaign to field a primary challenge to Sinema; only thirty-seven per cent of Arizona Democrats view her favorably; and the ambitious Democratic congressman Ruben Gallego, who seems like an obvious challenger for her seat, has been taking a rambunctious anti-Sinema line in the press˳ In April, Politico asked Gallego what it was like to interact with Sinema˳ “Honestly, we just haven’t,” Gallego said˳ “She’s not here that often˳”
Surely there’s some political calculation behind Sinema’s decision—maybe a conviction that she stands a better chance at winning reëlection as a third-party candidate than as a Democrat—but the timing is especially confusing: mainstream Democratic candidates in Arizona won races for both governor and senator last month, and running as a Democrat right now puts you in a better position in Arizona than it has in a very long time˳ But beneath the basic Sinema-ness of her exit—the faintly lunar atmosphere of self-actualization combined with spry political opportunism—there is a political mystery here˳ Why is she the only one?
The Trump era was supposed to be made for political lone wolves˳ There are structural reasons that American politics is inhospitable to dissenters: the combination of open primaries and first-past-the-post voting systems is effectively designed to channel outsider candidacies into one of the two major parties˳ But, in the 2016 Presidential campaign, each party’s primary was defined by an insurgency with both ideological and anti-élite overtones: Trump’s, which won, and Bernie Sanders’s, which lost˳ Each insurgency had leveraged a source of power that the party establishments could not control (in Trump’s case, media celebrity, and, in Sanders’s, small-dollar fund-raising) and which proved destabilizing, at least at first˳ The Republican Convention in Cleveland ended with Ted Cruz refusing to endorse Trump; inside and outside the hall, I heard more than one delegate asking whether this meant the end of the Republican Party˳ The Democratic Convention was punctuated by some Sanders delegates, having covered their mouths in masking tape, staging a walkout˳ The parties were already being rearranged by a new demographic sorting—college-educated voters moving toward the Democrats, and less-educated ones moving away from them—and it didn’t seem at all far-fetched to think that some politicians would follow their old constituents and re-affiliate, too˳ Maybe this was the time˳
It took a while for these changes to shake out˳ The early Trump days were defined, in part, by a broad defection, as a whole Never Trump phalanx of the Republican Party followed pundits like Rick Wilson and Bill Kristol out the door˳ But, among elected officials, the departures were barely a trickle˳ Would Lisa Murkowski leave the Party? Would Joe Manchin abandon the Democrats? Would Sanders and the outspoken progressives who were elected in 2018, often calling themselves socialists, foreshadow a break with the Democrats on the left, and would the Trumpist nationalists who have entered the Republican Party rupture the G˳O˳P˳’s right? The specific reasons were different in each case, but the answer was basically the same: no, no, and no˳ Even Republicans like Representatives Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger, whose opposition to Trump’s attempted insurrection on January 6th led them to be effectively ostracized from their party, have chosen not to step across the aisle to become Democrats˳
The parties have proved highly adaptive, the Democrats rushing to embrace the social-justice movements of 2020 and the Republicans aligning with the COVID resistance and “anti-wokism˳” (This is one reason that Elon Musk, for instance, who long billed himself as independent, now seems to have the views of a pretty conventional Republican˳) The parties’ leaders, too, have adapted, and have hugged the dissidents before they could break away˳ Chuck Schumer made Sanders a member of his party’s Senate leadership team, even though the Vermont socialist did not formally join the Democratic Party˳ Similarly, Kevin McCarthy has worked assiduously to incorporate the far right into his governing coalition, offering to reinstate committee assignments for the conspiracy-theorist congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene˳ I don’t mean to suggest an equivalence: the Democrats have adapted by moving toward a more expansive economic policy, and the Republicans by embracing authoritarians˳ One of these is good and the other bad˳ But the pressure to not lose a single seat, in a very evenly divided country, has worked on the leaders of both parties, and led them to find ways to accommodate their dissidents˳ In short order, a revolutionary phase in politics has given way to a counter-revolutionary one˳
There’s something a little illusory about Sinema’s “break” from the Party, too˳ She has said (and Schumer has confirmed) that she will keep her committee assignments, which likely means that she will caucus with the Democrats, as do two other nominal Independents, Sanders and Maine’s Angus King, both of whom are generally reliable Democratic votes˳ The Party’s leadership took a sanguine position on her defection˳ “Kyrsten is independent; that’s how she’s always been˳ I believe she’s a good and effective senator,” Schumer said, in a statement˳ The White House emphasized that it had “every reason to believe we will continue to work successfully with her˳” Nate Silver speculated, on Twitter, that Sinema’s decision probably had little effect on her odds of reëlection˳ But, whatever her electoral future, she is, for now, getting just about everything she might have asked for from the Party she has decided to leave˳
When Washington reassembles in the New Year, Biden will lead the White House, Schumer the Senate, and McCarthy (it seems likely) the House of Representatives˳ None of these three men is beloved by the base, nor seems like an obvious candidate to lead his party into the future˳ But they have each had a similar reaction to the instability of the past few years˳ If a political party is a family, then they have been the figures who have insisted that a separation need not be a divorce, that what is most important is that the family stay together˳ Even if it has changed˳ ♦
