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Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) is under pressure to support filibuster reform in the Senate.
Nearly the moment that votes were tallied in Georgia, formalizing Democratic control of the Senate, West Virginia Democrat Joe Manchin began to object: to $2,000 stimulus checks—which even President Biden himself pledged to pass—to filibuster reform, to the size of the stimulus package, to passing it via budget reconciliation. Manchin, who frequently voted with President Trump, wanted to make it clear that he would be a willing obstacle to the Democratic agenda, according to his own whims and fancies.
Just a handful of days later, in a series of media appearances both national and local, Manchin vocalized an openness to checks, to the bigger spending package, and to passing it without Republican support. He even wavered ever so slightly on the filibuster.
What changed? A series of radio spots went up in the state, paid for and produced by No Excuses PAC, a group founded by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez alums Corbin Trent and Saikat Chakrabarti and Justice Democrats co-founder Zack Exley. The ads identified Manchin as the obstruction standing between West Virginians and desperately needed relief. Per The Intercept’s Aída Chávez, Manchin was “getting pounded at home by a brutal radio ad.” And, not inconsequentially, he changed his tune.
Now, No Excuses is launching its second pressure campaign, targeting intransigent Democratic senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona. Sinema has gone to perhaps even greater lengths than Manchin to showcase her willingness to be an obstacle, and grab some of that spotlight from Manchin as the foremost Democratic opponent of filibuster reform in the Senate. And unlike Manchin, she’s doing it from a purple state Joe Biden won in 2020.
The group is up with radio ads across the state of Arizona, informing voters that their senator is one of Washington’s top obstructionists. It hammers Sinema not just on her support of the filibuster, but on the broad embrace of inaction that the filibuster necessitates. “She seems to think the Senate needs to do more talking and less doing,” said Trent, co-founder of the group and the voice-over artist on the ad spot. “Countless hours of partisan bickering and back-and-forth, they don’t prevent one case of COVID, they don’t stop one death, they don’t create one job,” the ad asserts. “It’s time Kyrsten Sinema stood up for the people and stood against the filibuster.”
The new ad is part of a multi-week multimedia campaign in Arizona. No Excuses has also taken out ad space in The Arizona Republic, the state’s largest newspaper, to drive home the message. And this time, the messaging comes with a recruiting pitch: No Excuses is looking for candidates who could primary Sinema from the left when her term is up in 2024.
The strategy is a new addition to Democratic politics, where it has not been commonplace to hit representatives back home for their work in Washington outside of an election cycle. While progressive primary challenges have pressured Democrats to move left in the House, the Senate, with its six-year terms, is more sheltered from that threat. No Excuses is hoping this strategy will make the left-wing presence a more persistent one, and help facilitate primary challenges of moderates if need be. “We’ve gotta create a little political gravity on that side of them,” said Trent.
Sinema’s stubbornness is especially confounding, at least compared to Manchin, given the respective political contexts of their states. Manchin is one of the only Democrats left at any level in arguably the country’s reddest state, one that has run away from Democrats at an astonishing pace. While Arizona can credibly be called purple, Joe Biden won the state in November, and it now sports Democrats in both of its Senate seats. Arizona’s fast-growing metropolitan areas and large Latino population, combined with significant organizing networks and popular movement groups, mean it’s a state where the progressive agenda has purchase now, and it will likely have even more in the future. The state recently legalized recreational marijuana and passed a substantial tax increase on high earners via ballot measure.
Sinema won in 2018, a wave election for Democrats, who rebuked Trumpism and overachieved all over the country. She beat extremely unpopular Republican Martha McSally, who went on to lose to Democrat Mark Kelly two years later for the state’s other Senate seat. Sinema, a former Green Party member who then became a conservative Democratic vote in the House, portrayed herself in the campaign as an independent. But the notion that a maverick Democrat can only win in Arizona through a willingness to defy the party’s priorities makes little sense in the current political climate. Most importantly, said Trent, it brings “very little benefit for the people she represents,” which is the message Arizonans are now hearing over the airwaves.
Sinema has gone to perhaps even greater lengths than Manchin to showcase her willingness to be an obstacle.
In some sense, the No Excuses operation buttresses the Biden administration’s, and helps the president and party enact their agenda. Biden dispatched Vice President Kamala Harris to West Virginia for a media tour and pressure campaign of their own, hoping to drum up public support to sway Manchin. (Harris, who is not popular in West Virginia, did a clumsy job of it, talking about “abandoned land mines” instead of “abandoned mine land” when extending an olive branch to coal country.) If the party had better message discipline or could be counted on to vote the party line as Republicans do, none of this would be necessary. But that’s not the Democratic Party that exists.
So far, the inside-outside game seems to be working, at least in a limited fashion. Manchin has not had a total political epiphany. Just yesterday, he did a YouTube live stream where he refused to support ending the filibuster and championed the legacy and reputation of notorious segregationist Robert Byrd as a roundabout way of supporting the Byrd Rule and the filibuster’s broad scope. And he appears to be the main obstacle to increasing the minimum wage to $15 an hour within the COVID relief package. But he’s fallen in line on the overall bill, which was in no way a certainty. Even Republican West Virginia governor Jim Justice recently called on him to support the bigger stimulus package.
Whether it will be enough to change Sinema’s tune is yet to be seen. But already, frustration is mounting in Arizona. Activist groups made up an important part of the coalition that helped Sinema across the finish line just over two years ago, and they’ve made their displeasure with her stance on the filibuster known.
It’s clear that it will be harder for Democrats to hide behind claims of Republican obstruction, when they are well within their abilities to enact meaningful legislation. Doing so immediately is a top priority, given the fragile trifecta Democrats currently sport. With redistricting looming and a fearsome 2022 midterm cycle, inaction would be tantamount to suicide for Joe Biden’s agenda. If Sinema and Manchin, under threat of relentless public pressure, do come around, it will mark another lesson from the mistakes of the Obama years that Democrats seem to be learning, grudgingly.
