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Senator Kyrsten Sinema’s decision to formally quit the Democratic Party could have serious consequences for America’s most famous socialist.
While Democrats in Arizona and across the country figure out how to handle the Senate’s newest independent, the cogs in the Democratic Party’s machine are already kicking her to the curb. Their actions could have major ramifications for some of her Senate colleagues.
Moments after Sinema declared her independence, her longtime progressive firm, Authentic, dropped her because its employees felt that working with her was tantamount to “devil’s work.” Now, NGP VAN, the Democratic Party’s top data firm, is cutting ties with her because she left the party.
Here’s where it gets complicated for the Democratic Party. Its top tools are reserved only for Democrats. There’s no wiggle room, as tools like its fundraising giant ActBlue have made clear by kicking non-Democrats off in recent years.
Platforms like ActBlue are bound to face increased grassroots scrutiny, since Sinema’s ongoing usage (her campaign links directly to her ActBlue fundraising page as of publication) is expressly banned by the software company.
“Only Democrats (not Republicans) can use our tools to fundraise,” ActBlue says. It quickly enforced this policy against the Democrat-turned-independent Mayor Byron W. Brown of Buffalo last year, even though he was a member of New York’s Democratic National Committee delegation at the time and a former chair of the state’s Democratic Party.
How does this impact Senator Bernie Sanders? Famously not a Democrat, the tens of millions of dollars he’s raised while an Independent fly in the face of the platform’s rules. And he’s not alone in making a mockery of the tool that’s supposed to be by Democrats, for Democrats. In fact, he’s not even the biggest violator of the ban on non-Democrats using it to raise money.
Assuming that Sinema runs for reelection, she’s poised to face at least a Democrat and likely a Republican opponent. This is exactly how Senator Angus King of Maine wins his elections. In fact, in all of King’s four statewide wins in Maine he has never run as a Democrat — and has actually defeated the Democrats’ nominee every time. Nevertheless, the Independent, non-Democrat King has an active ActBlue page.
ActBlue’s decision to boot the incumbent mayor of Buffalo — a Democrat in good standing prior to the platform’s decision to kick him off — shows that Sinema, Sanders and King are all in jeopardy. And like King, and presumably Sinema, Mayor Brown waged an ultimately successful campaign against the Democrats’ official nominee. In his first statewide win in 1994, for example, King narrowly won a four-way race for governor, defeating the Democrats’ nominee by under 2 percent. In 1998, King crushed the Democrats’ nominee for governor as he cruised to reelection.
In defending its decision to remove Mayor Brown, ActBlue laid the precedent for it to boot the Senate’s three independents. ActBlue removed Byron Brown because it bans candidates who are running against “a Democratic nominee in a partisan race,” it told the Investigative Post.
This policy leaves no wiggle room for King, who has done just that on multiple occasions, to remain on the platform. Same for Sinema — and even for Sanders, who in theory could face a Democratic opponent in 2024.
The specifics surrounding Brown’s removal from ActBlue foreshadow how Sinema could ultimately be removed from the platform. Like Brown, Sinema torched her bridge with the Democrats’ progressive base — which was the group that did Brown in.
In the days after Brown lost the Democratic primary, supporters of Democratic nominee India Walton took to Twitter to demand that ActBlue boot Brown because he was challenging the Democrats’ official nominee. Days later, the platform did just that.
The Senate’s three Independents are all up for reelection in 2024. All of them improperly use ActBlue… for now.
