Kyrsten Sinema quit the Democratic party in November, perhaps hoping to steal her now-former party's thunder after it gained a Senate seat in Georgia and no longer required hers. Concerns that she could act as an independent spoiler in the next election, however, appear to be misplaced: a poll of Arizona finds her so unpopular she would only draw 13% of votes. Moreover, if she doesn't run, her count splits 6% to 7%, respectively, to the likely Democratic candidate and the likely GOP candidate. Given the margin of error, it's as if she wasn't there.
In a hypothetical three-way general-election race with Lake and Gallego, Sinema comes in at an anemic 13 percent with Lake (at 41 percent) and Gallego (at 40 percent) in a dead heat. Perhaps more strikingly, Gallego (48 percent) and Lake (47 percent) would also be in a dead heat if Sinema didn't run at all in the general election. If these sort of numbers persist in future polls, any blackmail effort by Sinema to threaten to throw the Senate seat to the Republicans if Democrats don't back her might not get much traction.
In short: she's unpopular, what remains of her support has no partisan bias, and her only constituency now is corporate donors. Ed Kilgore:
She's worked hard to anger Democrats (a January poll showed her losing a primary to Gallego by a staggering 74-to-16 margin) and isn't remotely reactionary enough on cultural issues to win a majority of Republicans. … Her real constituency is on Wall Street and K Street, whose deep pockets could help finance an independent reelection bid — but not a winning one, if any of the numbers we've seen are even remotely accurate. It's more likely the senior senator from Arizona will be looking for employment from her wealthy friends in New York and Washington, D.C., in January 2025 rather than preparing to serve a second term.
