https://www.wsj.com/articles/a-partisan-thumbs-down-for-sinemas-verity-kyrsten-arizona-independent-democratic-party-intimidation-11670763136
Kyrsten Sinema didn’t always seem like a moderate. She ran for the Arizona House in 2002 as a member of the Green Party calling herself a “Prada socialist.” The next year she spoke at an antiwar rally clad in a pink tutu. Now she has left the Democratic Party to become an independent, complaining that “payback against the opposition party has replaced thoughtful legislation.”
Yet ideologically she hasn’t changed much. FiveThirtyEight.com notes that she has voted with President Biden 93% of the time. Where she departs from today’s Democratic Party is over its intolerant domination by progressives. In her 2009 book, “Unite and Conquer: How to Build Coalitions That Win and Last,” she describes how as a state legislator she came to believe that reform will stick only if it’s incremental and bipartisan. She said progressives had caught “the dread disease” of “identity politics” and wrapped themselves in the “mantle of victimhood.”
To the far left, that makes her the enemy. Last year protesters harassed her in a public rest room, and her fellow Democrats shrugged. Mr. Biden said, “I don’t think they’re appropriate tactics, but it happens to everybody. . . . It’s part of the process.”
She’s being vilified again. A headline on the leftist Daily Kos website calls her an “isolated weirdo.” The Atlantic describes her as “ideologically unpredictable and erratic.” She replies by recalling her promise to voters that “I would not demonize people I disagreed with, engage in name-calling, or get distracted by political drama.”