For months, eager Democratic donors have pressed the chair of the party’s Senate campaign arm, Sen. Gary Peters (D-MI), about the biggest question mark on the 2024 election map.
Asked about the party’s stance on Arizona—where a Democratic candidate is challenging independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema—Peters has consistently given the same answer, according to a donor who has seen him speak at several fundraisers.
The party, Peters has said, is currently neutral in the race.
Other private signals from the party have confirmed that posture. A recent email to donors from Senate Majority PAC, the outside group aligned with Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), made clear their ultimate goal is not necessarily to elect the Democratic nominee in Arizona.
“Despite the current uncertainty, our primary goal still is ensuring a Republican does not win,” reads the email, a copy of which was obtained by The Daily Beast.
According to several sources, the party’s donor class is responding accordingly, either limiting their involvement in the race or staying out of it entirely until Sinema announces whether she will seek a second term in 2024.
With Rep. Ruben Gallego (D) locking up support among Arizona Democrats and briskly fundraising as the presumptive party nominee, some Democrats see no point to getting on Sinema’s bad side while she remains a key vote in the Senate.
The unsettled GOP side of the Arizona race is not adding to any sense of urgency. Kari Lake, the polarizing MAGA star and failed 2022 governor candidate, is likely to run for the seat, and would immediately become the primary favorite over Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, the only declared Republican candidate so far.
But Lake is clearly in no rush to announce her decision, and as long as the presumptive GOP frontrunner is on the sidelines, Democratic leaders seem content to let Sinema’s decision run its course.
Increasingly, however, some donors and Arizona Democrats are growing impatient with the wait-and-see strategy from Washington.
There is concern that if Sinema does run, Democrats will have missed a window to begin organizing and defining the media narrative against her. There’s also concern that if she sits out, Democrats will have missed a moment to make early investments in the key battleground state.
“Democrats are playing a really dangerous game with sitting back and not engaging voters earlier,” said Luis Avila, a longtime progressive operative in Arizona who advises the Replace Sinema PAC, an outside effort that has been actively organizing to defeat Sinema since 2021.
“This kind of fear that Democrats have of pissing Sinema off, it’s making it harder for us to actually talk to voters in general,” Avila continued. “They want to know where we stand on Sinema… what Democrats are doing is making it harder for us to make the case for them.”
Against that backdrop, some donors who want to see Sinema gone appear reluctant to get behind a more wide-ranging effort to defeat her—at least at this stage.
A big-name Democratic donor who is supportive of Gallego, for instance, was asked if they would donate to support the PAC’s efforts. The donor declined, according to a source familiar with the situation.
The Democratic donor who heard Peters’ statement of neutrality, speaking on condition of anonymity, expressed hope that party brass could be swayed to take a more active role to ensure that Gallego wins.
“He used the word neutral—which means for the time being, there remains an appeal to be made to him to do something that isn’t just neutral,” the donor said.
In response to The Daily Beast, Democratic Senate Campaign Committee spokesperson Maeve Coyle said: “Republicans have suffered resounding Senate defeats in Arizona the last three election cycles in a row, and we are confident we will stop Republicans in their effort to take this Senate seat.”
The DSCC is already laying the groundwork for the 2024 general election, said an aide with the organization, investing in staff and other programs focused on pressuring Republicans.
Spokespeople for Senate Majority PAC and the Gallego campaign declined to comment.
Democrats who want to ensure that neither a Republican nor Sinema wins next year say there is positive momentum, even as top Washington Democrats remain neutral. The official Democratic apparatus in the state, for instance, is all-in for Gallego and against Sinema.
“Grassroots Democrats understand what’s at stake and that’s why they’ve poured so many contributions into Galleg’’s campaign and our efforts,” said Sacha Haworth, a senior adviser for the Replace Sinema PAC. Haworth also noted the group is hosting a D.C. event this week that Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) will headline. Notably, one of the party’s most powerful fundraisers, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is already leveraging her network to boost Gallego.
“Kyrsten Sinema lost the support of Arizona Democrats long before she officially left the party, and in poll after poll she comes in last place,” Haworth said. “We’re glad that national party leaders have started to come off the sidelines, because the Senate majority is going to run through Arizona—and we can’t let Sinema play spoiler and hand the seat to Kari Lake.”
Whatever ultimately happens, however, will likely be decided on Sinema’s own timeline. And it’s widely taken for granted by sources in Washington and Arizona that she will make her decision as late as possible—probably by January, if she were to try to meet the signature threshold to qualify for the ballot as a third-party candidate.
There is little incentive for Sinema to clear things up now. In a closely divided Senate, she is as influential as ever, and is surely well aware of the leverage she has as long as Schumer routinely needs her vote. Several Democratic sources believe that intervening too forcefully in Arizona at this juncture could endanger her support for their biggest priority of this session: confirming a long list of federal judges nominated by President Joe Biden.
In response to The Daily Beast, a Sinema spokesperson indicated she is not focused on the 2024 race.
“Arizonans are sick of extreme career candidates constantly saying and doing whatever it takes to raise more and more money,” the spokesperson said. “Kyrsten promised Arizonans she’d be an independent Senator who delivers lasting solutions, and that’s exactly what she’s done. She remains focused on solving challenges facing everyday Arizonans, not campaign politics.”
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REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Pressed on her future in public, Sinema has suggested she is simply too busy with legislation to comment on her 2024 plans—while presenting an obviously exaggerated spin on her record.
“The reality is I’m doing my job,” Sinema recently told the Arizona Republic. “As you know, over the last two-and-a-half years, every major piece of legislation that has passed the United States Congress I negotiated, drafted, wrote, passed. So I have a whole lot of work to do.”
Many political insiders have given up on the parlor game of figuring out whether the enigmatic senator might run for another term in 2024. Parsing the available tea leaves, some are increasingly convinced that she will not run; others believe it is more likely than not.
“I’d say she can’t do this,” said Chuck Coughlin, a veteran GOP operative and pollster in Arizona. “I don’t see the path unless she’s out there aggressively campaigning and raising money right now… A lot of things that should be happening aren’t happening.”
In Coughlin’s view, Sinema has not begun developing a clearly defined re-election message and narrative. Instead, he said, the senator herself is becoming the story of the race—her outsized role in Washington, her mutual antipathy with the Democratic Party, her will-she-or-won’t-she dance for the 2024 election.
Beyond that, Sinema’s most recent fundraising numbers struck many in Washington and Arizona as weak enough to indicate she is not prioritizing a re-election bid.
In the second quarter of 2023, she raised $1.3 million, much of it coming from wealthy donors and PACs. Several of those donors have already given the maximum allowable contributions, meaning that a key pool of funds for the campaign is already beginning to dry up.
In the same quarter, Sinema spent some $800,000, much of which went to travel expenses; one-fifth of the total was paid as security expenses to an LLC owned by Vrindivan Bellord, the sister of former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard.
Meanwhile, Gallego raised over $3 million over that same time period, much of it from small contributions channeled through the online fundraising platform ActBlue, which is likely to be a potent vein of small dollar contributions for him throughout the campaign.
Seeing Sinema’s fundraising numbers, Coughlin asked, “Is she really even paying attention?”
Of course, others in Arizona see plenty of indication Sinema is gearing up for a run. Avila noted that Sinema has been the top campaign spender on Facebook ads, which have promoted her legislative record and work for key constituencies.
“For someone who we think isn’t running, she’s spending a lot to make her profile more positive,” Avila said.
While Gallego is outpacing Sinema in fundraising, the incumbent is sitting on far more cash: roughly $10 million, which is a strong position well more than a year removed from election day.
Another indicator that Arizona insiders are watching: Sinema is not apparently spending time or money on collecting the thousands of signatures she would need to qualify for the 2024 ballot as a third-party candidate. It’s not yet clear exactly how many she would need, but it is believed to be more than 50,000.
In Arizona, signatures for campaigns can be collected using an online portal, but Sinema has not promoted the portal on any of her social media accounts, nor has her campaign spent any money on signature collection.
The high bar is “designed to keep people from being able to” qualify for the ballot, said Matt Grodsky, a former communications director for the Democratic Party of Arizona. “If she were serious about it, my assumption is she would be spending money now to get the signatures squared away as soon as possible,” he said. “The fact that she isn’t is suspect.”
While Coughlin suggested Sinema could probably collect the requisite signatures by an April deadline even if she announced late, the Arizona signature portal is no sure thing; it shut down temporarily last year after facing technical and then legal issues.
Fundamentally, Sinema’s biggest hurdle remains that it would be extremely hard to win as a third party candidate against two well-funded and well-known major party candidates. Preliminary public polls of the race have shown the incumbent senator far behind Gallego and various Republicans whose support was tested.
The one scenario in which Sinema might make a play, Coughlin theorized, is one where Lake clears the GOP field. The polarizing former local news anchor, who still denies Trump’s 2020 loss and her own loss in the 2022 governor’s race, would likely alienate a number of more moderate voters on the right and push them toward Sinema.
But that alone wouldn’t make her competitive. Sinema would also need some kind of epic collapse from Gallego. Given his fundraising strength, and the Democratic base’s antipathy for both Sinema and Lake, it would be hard to envision a scenario in which Gallego loses significant Democratic support.
Avila, who has known Sinema from her days as a Green Party organizer in the George W. Bush era, argued that no one should bank on the senator not running unless she says it herself.
“Whoever is saying she’s not going to run,” Avila said, “they haven’t been following her political career.”
