No one has bet more on herself since 2021 than Kyrsten Sinema. In a 50-50 Senate where you need 60 votes to get almost anything done, Sinema has sought to put herself squarely in the middle. She based her re-election campaign on the belief that good governance is good politics.
But Sinema has miscalculated, repeatedly, politically. Many of us would like to believe that good governance is good politics — i have a number of people i am proud to have helped elect who live by that proposition — but that requires that good governance is something that voters prefer. Today, we stand in a political environment where i would argue that is not always the case. Perhaps not ever the case.
Volunteers organized by Hope Springs from Field PAC have been knocking on doors in Arizona since 2021 and we are about to start up in 2024 next month. Some are eager to get back to it. “It’s 75° in Phoenix,” one text i received recently. Just to make sure i understood the hint, she next texted me: “That’s above 65°. Let’s get cracking.”
I had to explain to here that we have to pay for VAN (the voter file) up front so we’ll start in March, as planned.
Arizona is the only state currently on both Swing States maps (Senate and Electoral College). It’s also a Sunbelt State, so easy to start each year’s efforts there.
But Arizona doesn’t look the same as when we last canvassed there (Nov 18th). Last year, Conventional Wisdom was that Sinema had set up a three-person race, running as an independent (or, perhaps on the No Labels party line), against the Democratic Congressman, Ruben Gallego, and preferably the MAGA favorite, Kari Lake. Now, people seem to be coming around to my view that Sinema won’t even run. You just didn’t see the signs.
The Sinema people had already outlined their plan to prepare for her re-election campaign last year:
In April, Ms. Sinema and her advisers laid out a schedule for her decision that set a deadline of Sept. 30 for an initial round of public opinion polling and research into challengers, who include Representative Ruben Gallego, a Democrat, and Kari Lake, a Republican television-anchor-turned-politician who narrowly lost the governor’s race in 2022. By the end of December, Ms. Sinema would have a campaign staff in place.
But there is no sign that she carried out any significant polling, research or staff hires in the final six months of last year. She spent $6.9 million during the past year, new filings with the Federal Election Commission show, much of which went toward digital advertising, security and consulting.
New concerns also emerged on the other side of her campaign’s ledger. Ms. Sinema collected just under $600,000 during the final three months of last year — the fourth quarter in a row in which she had raised less than in the previous three-month period.
But September came and went (we were actually canvassing in the Fall), and no one heard of any polling even remotely connected to Sinema. December came and went, and there were no major staffing announcements. Instead, what you saw was the senator bogged down in the weeds of a Border Security compromise bill:
The centrist Arizona senator, who still aligns with Democrats despite leaving the party a year ago, has helped shape major laws related to infrastructure, climate, same-sex marriage and guns. Now, she is one of a handful of negotiators working to change U.S. immigration law, which lawmakers of both parties acknowledge is politically fraught, maddeningly complicated—and newly urgent, because Republicans made it a condition for backing new aid to Ukraine.
This latest test of Sinema’s deal-making abilities comes just as the senator is also closing in on a deadline on whether to run for re-election, this time as an independent. As she has chalked up successes on Capitol Hill, she has also angered many Democrats who helped get her elected five years ago, complicating her path to a second term. Arizona is struggling to manage a surge of migrants, further raising the political stakes.
[...]
Sinema says she can’t explain why her efforts in the Senate aren’t translating into more popular support. Allies say Sinema’s critics are missing the bigger picture, especially since Democrats are running for re-election on the laws that Sinema was central to enacting.
The calculation seems to have been, if she could have pulled off a Border Security/Ukraine funding compromise, the politics would take care of itself. But that didn’t happen. Congress’ hyperpartisan environment has, in effect, compromised the politics of compromise.
That wasn’t the only miscalculation Sinema made. When she turned her back on Democrats and the Democratic Party line — in part because of the primary challenge from Ruben Gallego — she was betting that the independent label would speak to Arizona and its traditional Maverick nature. The Arizona Capitol Times noted last year that “the latest voter registration numbers from the Arizona Secretary of State’s office show that independent voters edged out Republicans in July to become the largest single group of voters in the state.” Here’s the thing: Hope Springs volunteers re-registered 1,162 voters this year, many of them updating their voter registration to join the Active Early Voting List. We noticed that there were voters who had been registered as Democrats who re-registered as unaffiliated “because it didn’t seem that important.” Or they forgot to check the box. So when we talked about this loss of Democrats, volunteers shrugged.
The Motor Voter law made this more pronounced. When you register or re-register at the DMV, it’s easy to overlook the Party Registration box. And it’s not like the major political parties are seen in a favorable light. Hope Springs volunteers used to ask about voter impression of the Democratic Party in our Issues Canvass. If voter attitudes recorded a favorable impression of Democrats rose into the 30% range, that was a good week. Usually, voters would respond with about 25% favorable towards the Democratic Party and ~25% having an unfavorable impression. After two elections in Georgia, and matching Voter Turnout, Primary Voting behavior and other voter responses, we saw that voter attitudes toward the Democratic Party wasn’t relevant to their voting for Democrats on the ballot. We stopped asking — and we never asked a Republican voter. These were Democrats and Independents who were squeamish. As one of our organizers said, “We’ve (Democrats) have a brand problem.”
We will get a better idea about voter’s real proclivity (to some extent) with the next update of the voter file. That’s because, to participate in the Presidential Preference Election, voters have to register with one of the parties, at least temporarily, to participate on March 19. The deadline to change one’s party affiliation was February 20th. Still,
Arizona is a longtime Republican bastion where Democrats have won statewide in recent years by running as centrists who distance themselves from the party’s left wing.
Gallego is seen as more progressive than recent Democratic winners, who have been able to win the state by outperforming independents two-to-one and pulling in about 10% of Republicans.
Arizona remains one of “the most unpredictable Senate race on the 2024 map.”
Pollsters are starting to figure this out, though, including D/R numbers in their polling. But Kari Lake ran statewide last year; Gallego has not. Lake starts with an edge, at least in name recognition. But Gallego had one of the highest fund-raising totals last year for a Senate candidate who was not an incumbent.
Hope Springs from Field PAC has been knocking on doors since 2021 in a grassroots-led effort to prepare Electoral Battlegrounds in what has been called the First and Second Rounds of a traditional Five Round Canvass. We are taking those efforts to the doors of Democrats and unaffiliated voters with a systematic approach that reminds them not only that Democrats care, but Democrats are determined to deliver the best government possible to all Americans.
Obviously, we rely on grassroots support, so if you support field/grassroots organizing, voter registration (and follow-up) and our efforts to protect our voters, we would certainly appreciate your support:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel
Hope Springs from Field PAC understands that volunteer to voter personal interactions are critical. We believe that in-person voter contact that is interactive and volunteer-driven is key to success in 2024. But we need your help.
The presidential race is equally swingy. Arizona is one of a few states to trend Democratic since the time of Trump. “While it is still a toss-up, states like Arizona and Georgia are being pushed from ‘a reddish shade of purple to a bluish shade,’ ... because ‘big metro areas like Phoenix and Atlanta are getting bluer.’”
But, like the Senate race, Arizona remains a toss-up in the presidential race. The president’s Electoral College “numbers” have contracted since we were last in the field, with the consensus map adding both Michigan and Pennsylvania to the toss-up category.
In a major sense, Biden’s opportunity in Arizona has grown since 2020. Or, maybe, it’s the GOP just disintegrating from the turmoil. Like other swing states that got caught up in the Trump’s attempts to overturn the last election, Arizona Republicans have faced:
intense internal battles are tearing through the state Republican parties. The fights largely pivot around divisions that opened up in the wake of the last presidential election. A new cadre of Trump-loyalist party leaders, in many cases propelled into power based on their defense of the Big Lie that former President Donald Trump actually won in 2020, have found themselves at war with more establishment-aligned Republicans … and, increasingly, with each other.
One of the biggest revelations our Arizona volunteers found in 2023 was that the Trumpian revolt has “made it uncomfortable” to other Arizonans not in the cult. It’s not like they have turned free thinkers off of politics, they have created a revulsion from others (those outside the cult) from anything Trump.
Hope Springs volunteers knocked on 483,363 doors last year in Arizona, and we have now knocked on 32% of all doors in the state. We’ve collected 2,987 Constituent Service Request forms over the last two years, and gotten 41,172 Arizonans to fill out at least part of our Issues Survey. Remember, we knock on the doors of Democrats and unaffiliated voters, and we start doing this again on March 2nd. We have registered or re-registered 4,304 voters in the state.
We will continue our Issues Canvass again in March, and the Open Seat (AZ-03) to our efforts in AZ-01, AZ-04 and AZ-06. We will also — this being an election year — add the Post Cards to New Voters component back into our Voter Outreach, both New Voters we find at their doors as well as New Voters we target in the Voter File. Several of our Arizona organizers are also talking to Native American groups about replicating our Voter Matching service that Hope Springs provides for Black Churches. It’s a big year. There’s lots to be done, and, hopefully, we won’t have to suspect in-person voter contact because of a heatwave this year.
Our biggest expense is the Voter File. But it is also a fixed cost. That won’t change as we raise and spend more money. Printing literature is our second largest cost. Printing and mailing our our Post Cards to New Voters is our third cost and paying the fees for ActBlue is the smallest of our monthly costs.
Hope Springs is a seat-of-the-pants grassroots-driven operation. We don’t have employees and we realize that to formalize and professionalize this effort that will have to change. We spent less than $70,000 last year because we raised less than $70,000. We still haven’t paid for all the literature we distributed in Ohio and Arizona last Fall.
If you are able to contribute to our efforts to protect Democratic voters, especially in minority communities, expand the electorate, and believe in grassroots efforts to increase voter participation and election protection, please do. We need your help:
https://secure.actblue.com/donate/fistfulofsteel
You can follow that link for our mailing address, as well (for those who would rather send us a check). Thank you for your support! This work depends on you!