Kyrsten Sinema’s Shtick Was Worn-Out and Destructive. But That’s Not Why She’s Leaving the Senate.

Kyrsten Sinema, the independent U.S. senator from Arizona, has announced that she will not run for office again. Her farewell speech had one overarching message: America, I was great, but you didn’t appreciate me enough.

“Because I choose civility, understanding, listening, working together to get stuff done,” Sinema said, “I will leave the Senate at the end of this year.” She listed out her many purported accomplishments, then lamented, “But it’s not what America wants right now.”

It was an on-brand moment from a politician whose primary consideration and most important constituent has been herself. Sinema has long styled herself as a reasonable moderate just trying to get stuff done. In reality, she has been a self-serving attention monster, consistently willing to bend any purported principle if she believes doing so will empower her. She seems motivated less by service or even the garden-variety narcissism on display from so many elected officials than a desire for victory, power, and eyeballs. In that, she is hardly unique in Washington. But in a Congress where most of the venal showboaters are Republicans, men, or both, Sinema was singular: a Democrat who, once she got a bit more power, abandoned the party and often her constituents and instead catered to the ultrawealthy—and herself. Even in stepping down, she made it all about her.

Sinema was something of the enfant terrible of the Senate, albeit in the body of a Gen X woman fond of jewel-tone dresses and statement jewelry. She is despised by many Democrats for running as a member of the party only to take a completely obstructionist turn once in office, tanking some of the most important pieces of the Democratic legislative agenda. She made it impossible for Democrats to pass voting rights legislation, and launched a bizarre and ahistorical defense of the filibuster. For all her claims to bipartisanship, she actually impeded bipartisan efforts to allow for greater negotiation of Medicare prescription drug costs. She opposed the first minimum wage hike in more than a decade while also protecting corporations and America’s wealthiest from having to pay more in taxes—and when she cast her vote against raising the minimum wage for criminally underpaid workers as part of Biden’s pandemic aid bill, she offered a petulant (and headline-grabbing) thumbs down.

When one thinks of the most publicity-hungry grandstanders in American politics, the man at the obvious top of the heap is Donald Trump. And the others who make the list are largely Trump acolytes: Matt Gaetz, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar, Jim Jordan, Marjorie Taylor Greene, George Santos. They largely share a penchant for the ridiculous and the extreme, an apparent allergy to actually legislating, and an obsession with cultural statement-making and attacking the left. The Democratic Party also has its very public-facing members, many of them on the party’s left flank (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren).

But most of the time, those Democrats place themselves in the public eye to advocate for specific progressive policies, and position themselves as public servants advocating for the most vulnerable Americans. They find GOP foils, but their political identities hinge on making tangible change, not simply signaling their hatred of anyone who disagrees. Compare, for example, Boebert’s Twitter bio with AOC’s. AOC includes her raison d’être: “In a modern, moral, & wealthy society, no American should be too poor to live.” Boebert declares herself a “Professional RINO Hunter” who is “Raising my boys to be MEN before liberals teach them to be women!”

Sinema, admittedly, does not have a ridiculous Twitter bio. But she did put on the kind of ridiculous persona many have grown to associate with the MAGA right. Being a confusing iconoclast may have landed her some accolades and attention at various points earlier in her career, but by the end of 2022, when she declared she was no longer a Democrat but an independent—though she said “nothing” would change about “my values or my behavior”—her shtick had lost all of its intrigue. She stepped down not for the greater good of the state, but because the jig was up. She clearly looked at the forthcoming race and concluded she would lose.

This was obviously not the plan. In pursuit of power, Sinema took a well-established route: She moved to the center. Arizona is a politically atypical state, once deep-red and now moving blue, that has long valued political independence and a kind of stereotypically Western libertarianism. It was the home of Barry Goldwater and “maverick” Sen. John McCain. Sinema was not exactly bucking the conventional wisdom when she opted leave her Green Party days behind her and instead cozy up to Republicans, all in the name of bipartisanship.

But in a more polarized political era, those Republicans weren’t McCains; they were Mitch McConnell and his minions, more intent on blocking any meaningful legislation that could remotely further Democratic goals than on any kind of bipartisanship. And as with the most moderate of moderate Democrats in the White House, Sinema’s attempt at centrism didn’t exactly set her apart. Her posturing did. While she routinely avoided answering questions from journalists, she did seem to court a lot of press. It quickly became clear that reasonable moderation didn’t grab headlines. Smashing Joe Biden’s agenda did—especially when cloaked in the huffy self-righteousness of “independence.”

Few modern dynamics have been as destructive to the country as politics as entertainment. Sinema tried to ride this wave irregularly. But Democratic voters, it turns out, really did want to see meaningful change from their lawmakers, and when Sinema abandoned the party, they left her out to sea.