Where will Kyrsten Sinema’s centrist voters go?
As a charter bus operator and a die-hard independent voter in Phoenix, Bj Brooks knows a lot about lane changes.
She was once a registered Republican who voted for Senator John McCain. Then she became a big fan of Senator Kyrsten Sinema, the Democrat who left the party to become an independent and announced last week that she was withdrawing from the Senate race.
Some independent voters in Arizona said they feel they have lost a champion. While Ms. Sinema angered many former supporters, moderate voters said she spoke for a part of the country that craves compromise and feels alienated from both Democrats and Republicans.
“We needed her,” Mrs. Brooks said. “They hit her and hit her from both sides. There was no one to fight with her.”
In more than a dozen interviews, voters who stuck with Ms. Sinema and had recently donated to her campaign fund said they had hoped she would defy the political gravitas of her declining voting numbers and run for reelection this year in a three-way race . – if only to give independents another option.
Now they worry that replacing a politician they saw as a centrist who made deals in the Senate with a more partisan senator could push American politics further to the left or right.
Ms. Sinema helped craft bipartisan legislation on infrastructure and guns, but she also thwarted key parts of the Democratic agenda before leaving the party altogether to become an independent.
The number of independent voters in historically Republican Arizona has increased in recent years as fewer voters choose to register with one of the major parties.
The state’s 1.4 million voters listed as “other” are now doing well 34 percent of Arizona’s electorate, Democrats far outnumber Democrats and only slightly lag behind registered Republicans. While many independent voters are partisans without the label, others are in the winnable middle.
The likely Democratic and Republican nominees to replace Ms. Sinema — Representative Ruben Gallego of Phoenix and Kari Lake, a Trump-backed former candidate for governor — are already working to win over Ms. Sinema’s supporters.
Each campaign issued conciliatory statements about Ms. Sinema after she withdrew from the race last week. Mr. Gallego, who previously gave her a “business sale” who was unfit to lead Arizona, thanked her for her service. Mrs. Lake, who had accused Mrs. Sinema partly to blame before the border crisis, said, “I know she shares my love for Arizona.”
Opinion polls suggested Ms. Sinema would have attracted about 25 percent of voters potential three-way race. Political strategists said it was now more likely that more of them would turn to Mr. Gallego than to Ms. Lake.
But the election may now hinge, the strategists said, on which campaign can better portray the other as extremist, and on whether Mr. Gallego or Ms. Lake can better appeal to the Arizona center on issues such as border security, inflation and abortion.
In interviews with a dozen Sinema voters — Democrats, independents and moderate Republicans — most said they would vote for Gallego.
Some said he was too liberal, but they balanced his service as a Marine with their concerns. Independents and moderate Republicans said they welcomed Ms. Lake’s promises to crack down on fentanyl trafficking, but they said they had not forgiven her for telling McCain Republicans that she “Go the fuck away” at a campaign rally during her failed bid to become governor in 2022. Ms. Lake said the statement was a joke.
Alan F. Castillo, a former Marine who voted for Mr. McCain, said he was particularly drawn to Mr. Gallego because of his military background. Still, he felt torn between the two candidates, who he said had been bickering on social media all day like “two six-year-olds in each corner.”
William K. Perry, a fourth-generation farmer who grows alfalfa in western Arizona’s Harquahala Valley, said he was leaning toward Mr. Gallego but found the choice frustrating. “Ruben is quite far to the left, and Kari is quite far to the right,” he said. “I don’t know why more people wouldn’t embrace someone in the middle.”
Some liberal activists said it had been years since they had been able to reach Ms. Sinema. But Mr. Perry said the senator always responded to him. When he had to discuss an area of tax law during the Trump administration, she had her staff reach out. When Mr. Biden was elected, she helped Mr. Perry get a seat on an agriculture committee, he said.
Ms. Sinema, a social worker, entered politics in the early 2000s as an anti-war activist affiliated with the Green Party. But after losing her first race by a wide margin, she joined the Democratic Party and began what analysts called a long upward march toward the political center, modeled on Mr. McCain’s maverick image. Mrs. Sinema calls him a personal hero.
In 2018, she became the first Democrat elected to the Senate from Arizona since the 1980s. She accomplished this feat by running as a conservative Democrat who attracted just enough independents and moderate Republicans who were turned away by former President Trump.
But she chased away her own supporters after she… thumbs down on a vote to raise the minimum wage as part of a Covid relief bill. They seethed after she blocked efforts to override the filibuster to pass voting rights legislation and protected a tax loophole that benefits wealthy investors. Liberal activists criticized her for taking millions of dollars in donations from the financial industry and wealthy corporate donors.
Republican leaders praised her as an effective dealmaker, but ultimately Republicans killed its bipartisan border security bill.
“Kyrsten Sinema did so much for Arizona, but in this age of tribalism, she was a woman without politics at home,” said Barrett Marson, a Republican strategist in Phoenix.
Alejandra Gomez, executive director of LUCHA Arizona, a progressive activist group, said the senator failed Democratic voters long before they abandoned her. She said Latino volunteers played a crucial role in Ms. Sinema’s 2018 victory by knocking on 1 million doors to get voters to turn out, but the senator declined to attend a thank-you event for their volunteers.
“Her door was closed to us,” Ms. Gomez said. “She stopped listening.”
Ms. Sinema’s office said the senator regularly met with LUCHA and its members during her first years in office. However, her relationship with liberal supporters soured when activists hoping to pressure Ms. Sinema on voting rights and climate change began protesting outside her offices.
Juliana Rivera Horwin, 71, an independent voter and retired sixth-grade teacher and union leader in Scottsdale, said she had known Ms. Sinema since the senator was a social worker calling for more help for her low-income school in Phoenix.
She credited Ms. Sinema with securing federal money to build battery factories, solar panels and microchip factories throughout Phoenix, and had hoped to vote for Ms. Sinema in a three-way race. She gave money to Ms. Sinema’s campaign even though Ms. Sinema’s fundraising numbers had recently dropped and she had not taken steps to collect signatures to get on the ballot in 2024.
“I’m not interested in a party,” Mrs. Horwin said. “I’m very curious who will do the job. I would vote for her.”
Stephanie Rimmer, a moderate Democrat who runs a lighting company in Scottsdale, said she felt Ms. Sinema had been driven out of the Senate for governing as a centrist and for creating a political home for voters who supported both abortion rights and border protections. safety, and who were not on television every day. She hopes that her successor will follow Ms. Sinema’s example and leave the political party.
“It is very sad for our country to see her have to retire,” Ms Rimmer said. “There is no room for people like us.”