Arizona activists have launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise money for a potential 2024 Democratic primary challenger to Sen. Kyrsten Sinema if she does not vote to end the filibuster or continues to obstruct President Joe Biden's agenda.
A committee of Arizona organizers who have helped turn the state blue since 2018, when Sinema narrowly won her seat, launched the conditional fundraiser to pressure the senator to stop undermining her party's agenda. Sinema opposes the Democrats' $3.5 trillion spending bill, balking at both the price tag and key measures like drug pricing reform and tax hikes on the wealthy and corporations. She has also vehemently defended the filibuster, which has prevented any progress on the Democrats' voting rights legislation as well as a minimum wage increase, immigration reform, gun violence measures, police reform, LGBTQ protections, protections for workers' right to unionize and other bills that have already passed the Democratic-led House.
"It's time to send a message that she can't ignore," the group's CrowdPAC page says. "Either Sen. Sinema votes to end or reform the Jim Crow filibuster this year or we fund a primary challenge to replace her with someone who will."
State Sen. Martin Quezada, a Democrat who is backing the effort, told Salon that for sitting lawmakers, "the only thing that really gets you motivated to start seriously considering changing your views on things is if you are facing a threat to your seat."
Quezada stressed that he hopes "we wouldn't ever have to actually fulfill a primary threat and that she will ultimately take the steps that are needed to protect our state from the many threats we're facing right now."
Beln Sisa, one of the organizers behind the campaign and the former national Latino press secretary for Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign, said she hopes the primary threat will serve as a "wakeup call." Sisa, who in 2018 worked for NextGen America, the largest youth vote mobilization organization in the country, said she expected Sinema to "be more of an ally" but instead the senator is acting more like a Republican.
What the CrowdPAC is meant to do, said Kai Newkirk, a lead organizer in building the Arizona Coalition to End the Filibuster, is to "paint the picture of the threat to [Sinema's] political future if she stays on this course" and show clearly "that Democrats and left-leaning independents in Arizona and across the country will provide the resources necessary for a competitive and successful primary challenger."
Supporters can now pledge donations to back the effort. The campaign is not endorsing a specific potential challenger for a primary that is still almost three years away. But if Sinema does not vote to end or reform the filibuster or continues to obstruct Biden's agenda, pledges will be converted to donations and the money split between a "credible Democratic primary challenger" who opposes the filibuster and "has a strong record of accountability to all of the communities that make up Arizona" and organizations in the state that "will provide the independent grassroots organizing to power a successful primary challenge and a general election victory."
The entire progressive agenda is being held "hostage" and Sinema has the opportunity to advance it, said Karina Ruiz, one of the CrowdPAC organizers and an immigrant rights leader. "We can't continue to support a candidate that is not going to deliver for the people."
The crowdfunding effort comes amid widespread scrutiny of Sinema's corporate ties. The senator reportedly told colleagues that she would not support a Democratic plan to lower prescription drug costs, even though she campaigned in 2018 on doing just that. Sinema has received more than $750,000 from pharmaceutical and medical firms. She has also balked at the Democratic proposal for tax increases on big corporations and wealthy individuals after taking more than $900,000 from industry groups and companies who are leading a massive lobbying blitz to defeat the bill. On Tuesday, Sinema held a pricey fundraiser with five business lobbying groups that largely back Republicans and have opposed the tax increases.
Ruiz, who helped register thousands of voters ahead of Sinema's 2018 election, said it was "disappointing" and "saddening" to see a candidate who campaigned on helping the middle class and people who are economically unstable reverse positions "because they're getting money from corporations."
Sisa said that if "fundraising and campaign fundraisers are what [Sinema] cares about, then that is what we will use to hold her accountable.
"If you don't do what the people are asking you to do, then we are going to hit you where it hurts," she said. "And that is bankrolling your opponent."
Progressive activists have tried for months to pressure Sinema to support elimination or reform of the filibuster in hopes of advancing legislation that Republicans are blocking from receiving a floor vote. But Sinema's opposition to Biden's spending agenda, which includes an expansion of health care benefits, child care, family care and measures to combat climate change, has led to widespread frustration with the senator among mainstream Democrats.
"The general public is starting to see that we're not making progress on a number of issues and those issues are getting so broad that there's an issue for everybody to be upset about," Quezada said. "There's no excuse for not making progress if Democrats have the House, Senate, and the White House. So that frustration is going to continue to build the more that we see progress failing to be made on all these important issues."
Newkirk argued that the issue has been "misrepresented" as a break between progressives and Sinema when it's "actually about essentially the entire Democratic Party" feeling alienated from Arizona's senior senator.
"Biden was elected as a moderate, he's pushing a moderate compromise agenda that's been shaped by progressives and all parts of the party and it's very popular. Sinema is standing in the way of that," he said. "It doesn't represent any part of the voters who elected her, it doesn't represent any part of what the Democratic Party has been fighting for. If anything, it appears to represent the interests of corporate donors that are backing her."
Last Saturday, the Arizona Democratic Party overwhelmingly voted to back a resolution threatening a vote of no confidence against Sinema if she does not reverse her support for the filibuster or "continues to delay, disrupt, or votes to gut" the Democrats' spending plan. More than 90% of the Arizona Democratic Party State Committee previously voted in the spring to back ending the filibuster.
"This is an official public expression that the positions she's taking are not in line with the party that she represents in the state of Arizona and the people who are a part of that party," said Quezada, one of the members who introduced the resolution.