Getting Sinema to join the GOP is neither wise nor necessary for Republicans and conservatives, and switching parties would be of dubious value to her.
Bobby suggests that Republicans should try to induce Kyrsten Sinema to come over to the GOP caucus in the Senate, and possibly join the party:
Admittedly, this wouldn’t be a perfect fit. Sinema is considerably left of the median Republican in a variety of policy areas, especially social issues, and conservatives should want a senator who more adequately reflects their values, especially in Barry Goldwater’s home state. But on the whole, she’s not terrible, and given the shambolic state of the Arizona GOP and its abysmal track record the last few election cycles, there’s no reason to have faith that the state party will nominate a candidate in 2024 who’s capable of winning a statewide general election. Perhaps Sinema fills the bill as “the most conservative candidate who is electable.” If so, Republicans might be wise to welcome her with open arms, and Kyrsten might want to think about coming over to the dark side.
Sinema is, of course, always welcome to switch caucuses, but what Bobby is talking about here is Republicans’ backing her reelection in 2024. And while this would be a clever move for Republicans, not everything that is clever is wise or necessary. Getting Sinema to join the GOP is neither wise nor necessary for Republicans and conservatives, and switching parties would be of dubious value to her.
First, what would be the value to anyone of Sinema’s switching caucuses now? Counting Sinema and two other “independents” in the Democratic caucus, Democrats have 51 senators plus the vice president. If Sinema had switched parties before the midterm election, she would have thrown control of the 50–50 chamber to Mitch McConnell. Now, unless some current Democratic senator dies or resigns or she gets Joe Manchin to switch with her, a Sinema switch would just revert things to 50–50, with Kamala Harris casting the tiebreaker vote.
And what would Republicans gain even if they took the Senate? As of now, with Republican control of the House and Joe Biden in the White House, the party can stop Democratic legislation and conduct investigations, but has no hope of passing legislation on its own. Even if Republicans had won the Senate in 2022, all of that would still be true today. Sinema and Manchin should be lauded for helping Republicans stop some of Democrats’ worst excesses in 2021 in terms both of bad legislation and efforts to tear down the Senate filibuster, but the House can now do the former without them, and the Democrats have fewer incentives to attempt the latter without control of the House. By contrast, the unique value of controlling the Senate is in stopping the confirmation of Biden nominees to executive and particularly judicial posts. Yet, Sinema has been a reliable Democratic Party loyalist in those votes. There is no sign that she would be open to changing that posture, and if she did, it would require an implausible and visibly desperate transformation in her public stances.
Second, Arizona Republicans are not so desperate that they need to do this. Sure, the party has had a rough losing streak with the 2022 races for governor and attorney general, the 2020 presidential race, and Senate races in 2018, 2020, and 2022. But Arizona is not Vermont. As I have detailed here and here and here, Arizona remains the same reddish-tinged state that made Doug Ducey a two-time governor:
Before 2022, Democrats hadn’t elected a state attorney general since 2006 or a state treasurer since the 1960s; the state treasurer’s race this year was a Republican blowout…In the House, Republicans have held onto six of the state’s nine seats, winning the popular vote across those House races by a margin of 56.9 percent to 43.1 percent. Two Republican incumbents ran unopposed, but even if you arbitrarily assume that Democrats would have taken a third of the vote in each of those deep-red districts, Republicans would still have won the statewide vote for the House by 51.3 percent to 48.7 percent. Exit polls showed an electorate that was 33 percent Republican, 27 percent Democrat, 36 percent self-identified conservatives, and 22 percent self-identified liberals.
While the state is no longer as deep-red as it once was, from 2018 to 2022, Arizona shifted five to seven points towards Republicans in the statewide popular vote for the House, the state senate, and the state assembly. The party’s problem has mostly been a matter of picking bad candidates for statewide races. But there is no reason to assume that this will necessarily be fatal in the 2024 Senate race. The party has another chance to learn from its mistakes, and it is possible that sensible conservatives can rally behind a single standard-bearer in the primary while Kari Lake and Blake Masters divide the “ultra-MAGA” vote. But even if it fails to learn, the presence of both Sinema and Ruben Gallego on the ballot means that the Republican nominee in 2024 will likely be in a position to win without needing a majority of the vote. The one sure way to rescue Democrats from the division between Sinema and Gallego would be to get Sinema on the R line.
If you subject the socially liberal Sinema to William F. Buckley’s old “most conservative viable candidate in the general election” test, she fails; there is simply no reason to think that she is the most conservative figure capable of winning that seat in 2024. Sinema may be near the right edge of the Democratic Party, but she is still to the left of Jeff Flake and John McCain, to say nothing of Lake, Ducey, Masters, Mark Brnovich, and Karrin Taylor Robson.
Finally, the national Republican establishment’s welcoming Sinema into the party and trying to pass her off as the GOP nominee for the Senate in Arizona in 2024 would be just about the worst idea possible for fixing what ails the party nationally and in Arizona in particular. Why do Republicans keep nominating disastrous candidates such as Lake and Masters? Why is Kelli Ward the chair of the Arizona Republican Party? In large part because a big segment of the party’s voters simply do not trust the party leadership, and suspect it of being run by unprincipled, socially liberal careerists who are eternally trying to pull one over on the socially conservative grassroots. That leaves those voters with nobody they trust to warn them against bad candidates who posture as angry anti-establishment populists, while also feeding voter mistrust of actual conservatives such as Ducey and Brnovich. The surest way to confirm all of the worst suspicions of these voters and enflame another round of self-destructive populist rage would be to try to thwart Lake by foisting an actual socially liberal Democrat on the party. It would likely backfire spectacularly in the primary, and even if it didn’t, it would ensure a poisonous level of infighting in the fall, possibly even including a third-party candidacy from the right.
I am a great believer in accepting our friends and allies for the virtues they have, rather than focusing excessively upon their limitations. In the words of Alexis de Tocqueville, “Virtues of any kind are rare enough that those who have them should not be harassed about their type and relative importance.” Sinema has been helpful to conservative causes as a dissident Democrat and now as a third-party senator who could split the vote to Republican advantage in 2024. But as I have written previously about Tulsi Gabbard, we should not be such cheap dates for anyone who switches sides. Conservatives can and will do much better in Arizona in 2024 than voting for Kyrsten Sinema.