The Most Influential Senate Primaries in 2022 Are the Ones That Aren’t Happening - Part 2
Article by Lorenzo Levy | Image by Michal Matlon
My previous analysis of Senate primaries in 2022 was focused on how Republican Senators can get away with being more bipartisan than the MAGA base would prefer them to be and with being more extremist than their center and center-left constituents would prefer. However, there are two Democratic Senators whose not being up for reelection until 2024 has been the bane of Democrats’ existence. If you have not already rolled your eyes in disgust because you know who I’m about to talk about, these two “free-thinkers'' are of course Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona.
Manchin, it must be said, is the most vulnerable Democrat in the entire Senate. His state voted for Trump by over 38 points and has an economy heavily dependent on fossil fuels, especially coal. The fact that Manchin was able to win the general election in 2018 by over 3 points was nothing short of a miracle for the Democratic party. If he hadn’t won his seat in 2018, Democrats would not have won a majority in the Senate in 2020, even if they won the two seats in Georgia. This being said, the extent to which Manchin’s commitment to keeping the filibuster has angered Democrats nationwide, but this is actually great for him strategically.
When Democrats from California and New York attack Manchin on Twitter, he looks that much more bipartisan to his overwhelmingly Republican constituents. Since Manchin can only win with a large number of crossover votes, his defense of the filibuster is helping his reelection. However, progressive giant Sen. Bernie Sanders has toyed publicly with endorsing a primary challenger to Joe Manchin. There are certainly progressives in West Virginia, like the unsuccessful 2020 Democratic nominee Paula Jean Swearengin, but none of them have a name recognition or reputation among West Virginia voters nearly as large as Joe Manchin. An unsuccessful progressive primary challenger would most likely not succeed in its goal of beating Manchin; instead, it would most likely make Manchin look more moderate and appealing to crossover voters in contrast. Even though Manchin could most likely survive if not benefit from a primary challenge, the fact that he does not have an election until 2024 means he does not have to think about trying to justify his obstructionism to his small Democratic base. Instead, he can focus on appealing to the bigger block of voters, Independents and moderate Republicans, who enjoy seeing him torpedo Biden’s agenda.
Kyrsten Sinema’s situation is a bit less understandable. Whereas Joe Manchin has held a statewide office in West Virginia every year since 2001 (first Secretary of State, then governor, then Senator), Kyrsten Sinema has only held statewide office in Arizona since 2019. Thus, she has nowhere near the same level of credibility with Arizona voters as Manchin does with West Virginia voters.
West Virginia voted for Trump by over 38 percentage points in 2020, while Arizona voted for Biden by 10,000 votes. Sinema is not under nearly as much pressure to appeal to Republican voters as Manchin is. Arizona has some of the deepest ties to the extreme, conspiratorial, and seditious wing of the Republican party. Arizona was one of the closest states in the 2020 Presidential Election, so there has been a concerted far-right effort to hijack the democratic infrastructure of Arizona, through various lawsuits, fake elector schemes, and unnecessary audits that end up concluding that Biden won by even more votes. The person thought to be the originator of the Q-anon cult, Ron Watkins, is an Arizonan, as is Rep. Paul Gosar, recently famous for tweeting an anime meme of him killing Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, as is Mark Finchem, the election-denying January 6 attendee nominee for Secretary of State and card-carrying Oath Keeper.
Kyrsten Sinema’s “bipartisan” obstructionist antics may win her a bit of credibility with some Republicans, but ultimately, they will probably end up voting for a Republican anyway. There is also a much larger base of Democratic voters in Arizona than in West Virginia, and they are angry. The amount of Democrats Sinema has alienated almost certainly exceeds the number of Republicans she would convince to vote for her so that she could keep obstructing Biden.
Another point of contrast between Sinema and Manchin is their image to voters. Manchin is a straight, male, Catholic coal millionaire, the kind of person that Republicans and conservative-leaning independents picture when they picture a Senator. Kyrsten Sinema is non-Christian, bisexual, woman who worked as an academic and Green Party activist, the absolute antithesis of what Republicans and conservative-leaning independents picture when they picture a Senator. I am not saying that any of this by itself should preclude Sinema from being a Senator (quite the opposite actually), but Sinema’s approach indicates that she wants her path to electoral victory to be through moderate and Republican crossover voters, so her image becomes a campaign liability.
Another difference in Sinema’s situation from Manchin’s is that there are several high-profile progressive Democrats who have enough clout in state level politics to have a solid chance to primary her. Chief among them is Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Harvard-educated Marine combat veteran, who has hinted at challenging Sinema and has already garnered large public support for doing so.
The strangest part about Kyrsten Sinema is that without considering the filibuster, she would be a solid mainstream Democrat, albeit with the occasional break from party-lines, as is expected for any Senator. When Senate Democrats were trying to pass a voting rights bill, for example, Sinema voted for it, but since she (and Manchin) did not agree to carve out any exception to the filibuster, the Republicans were able to kill the bill.
Presumably, for a situation like that, Sinema realized that she could say to her liberal constituents that she voted for the bill, but to her conservative constituents that she allowed for it to die. Since Sinema does not have a primary until 2024, hard as it is to believe, she is under less scrutiny than if she had a primary this year. If she brought up that example of the voting rights bill during a primary debate, a primary challenger could bring up the fact that she ended up killing the bill. During a general election debate, her Republican opponent could either attack her for voting for a liberal bill in the first place, or more likely (since voting rights are popular, and attacking them is unpopular), the Republican opponent would call Sinema out as hypocritical, something voters hate.
Aside from a hypothetical scenario, it remains unclear whether Sinema’s filibustering record will still be top of mind with Arizona primary voters. If Democrats manage to win a net two more Senate seats and keep the House, then Sinema’s affection for the filibuster will be irrelevant, and she can focus her campaign on the rest of her fairly progressive positions. A primary challenger could make the case that Sinema’s filibuster stance would be an issue if Democrats ever have a slim majority again, but in the course of writing this article, I can assure you that it is much more difficult to make a case about a hypothetical scenario than a real one.
The data highlights the contrast between Sinema and Manchin very well. A recent August poll from Data for Progress has only 34% of Arizona Democrats approving of Kyrsten Sinema. A poll from April 2022 has Joe Manchin at an overall approval rating of 57% among West Virginia voters. In the first quarter of 2021, before Manchin had too much of a chance to obstruct Joe Biden, his approval was only at 40%. Even more relevant for Sinema, a Data For Progress Poll from October 2021 showed her losing to Rep. Gallego in a primary by 58 percentage points. A February 2022 poll from Triton Polling and Research showed Manchin beating the incumbent Republican governor Jim Justice (a former Democrat who would thus have non-negligible crossover appeal) in a race for Senate by four percentage points, with a lead of over twenty percentage points against less prominent West Virginia Republicans like State Attorney General Patrick Morrissey. Without a primary to keep her accountable, Kyrsten Sinema has lost touch of what her voters actually want, since she is not meeting with constituents or responding to criticism from Democratic peers as much.
The decision the framers of the Constitution made to stagger Senate elections has had an outsize political impact on the United States over two centuries later. President Biden’s bipartisan compromise legislative agenda would not have been able to have been passed without ten Republican Senators without primaries in 2022 to break the GOP filibusters. If Sinema and Manchin had primaries, there would have likely been no filibusters to break, and President Biden could have likely passed the full extent of his legislative agenda on infrastructure, voting rights, reproductive rights, LGBTQ rights, gun safety, raising the minimum wage, police accountability, and climate funding. Especially with voter suppression, gerrymandering, unequal representation in the Senate, and state legislatures eager to overturn elections, these last two years might have possibly been the last time Democrats had both chambers of Congress and the Presidency. Therefore, there may never be another time where progressive policies can be passed without near total dilution from Republicans.
Sources Cited
https://berniesanders.com/get-involved/paula-jean-swearengin/
https://www.manchin.senate.gov/about
https://www.sinema.senate.gov/about-kyrsten
https://www.tomohalleran.com/blog/qanon-promoter-ron-watkins-is-running-for-congress-in-arizona
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/22/ruben-gallego-deep-dive-00027134
https://rubengallego.house.gov/
https://www.sinema.senate.gov/senate-floor-remarks-voting-rights-americas-divisions-and-us-senate
https://coppercourier.com/story/poll-arizona-kyrsten-sinema/
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/11/06/us/elections/results-senate-elections.html
