Kyrsten Sinema Running Out Of Campaign $$$ For Vital Constituent Outreach At Luxury Hotels, Posh Restaurants

Democratic and Republican donors alike are bailing on founding Sinema Party member.

Nov 15, 2023

Sen. Kyrsten Sinema of the Sinema Party still hasn’t declared whether she’s running for re-election, although the clock is ticking. However, every day seems to provide more reasons for Sinema to join Joe Manchin on a self-serving farewell tour.

Polls continue to show Sinema, the incumbent senator from Arizona, a distant third in a race against actual Democrat Ruben Gallego and MAGA loon Kari Lake. The National Republican Senatorial Committee shared an internal poll with Republicans over lunch recently that had Sinema with a humiliating 17 percent of the vote, compared to Lake’s 37 percent and our boy Gallego’s 41 percent. NRSC Chair Steve Daines confirmed that Sinema takes more votes from Republicans than Democrats, and I assume it must pain her to know she’s helping Democrats in any way.

Daines predicts, though, that Republican voters will reject Sinema completely once the NRSC reminds them that Sinema has voted consistently with the Biden administration (she’s just been annoying about it).

Sinema also has major financial problems. Democratic donors have shown Sinema the back of their hands after she left the party last year and started her own indie centrist label. According to a Politico analysis, Gallego has raised two-and-a-half times as much from donors who contributed to Sinema’s 2018 campaign than Sinema herself.

Excuse me for a second …

Sinema was one of the strongest fundraisers in the Senate since she first started running in 2017, but (not so) shockingly, most of those donors are loyal to Democrats not to Sinema Party members.

“Her fundraising is somewhat dried up,” Barrett Marson, a Republican operative in Arizona, said while presumably laughing his ass off. “There isn’t an independent donor base as there is a Republican donor base and a Democratic donor base.”

Sinema raised just $826,000 from July to September. That’s about half what she reported for the second quarter of 2023 and less than a third of what Gallego brought in during the same period. Democrats are treating Gallego as their presumptive nominee and opening their wallets accordingly. Sinema might’ve thought ditching her former party and avoiding a primary could spare her the wrath of Democrats, but at this rate, she’ll be broke before the general election begins.

Gallego raised $691,000 from Sinema’s biggest 2018 donors, while Sinema herself raised only $277,000 from that same group, according to the POLITICO analysis of campaign finance data. And donors who backed Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly‘s campaign in last year’s high-stakes Senate race in the state have also donated more to Gallego than to Sinema. The analysis includes all large-dollar donors — those giving at least $200 — through Sept. 30, the latest data available.

Sinema’s fundraising totals have decreased by 20 percent with each successive quarter this year. The early donors are the most engaged, and while she can fundraise more openly once she officially declares her candidacy, she might find that no one’s answering her calls. She’s a known spendthrift, and she’s already blown 45 percent of the $4.9 million she’s raised this year even though she’s not actually running a campaign.

Gallego has attracted almost 3,000 of the big money donors who funded Sen. Mark Kelly. He is also doing amazingly well with small donors. Meanwhile, Sinema has the support of just 140 Kelly donors, but she can proudly state that she’s won over 19 donors from failed human cloning attempt Blake Masters.

She might hold out hope for her corporate super PAC buddies, but her consistently crappy polling doesn’t buttress an argument that only she can defeat Lake or that Gallego is too progressive to win statewide in Arizona. She’s a bad investment, the Bitcoin of senators.

[Politico]

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