Cross-posted from skyislandscriber.com

Bob Lord at Blog for Arizona reminds us that Reality Calls: Kyrsten Sinema May Be the Most Important Vote You Ever Cast. Here it is in full.

I was hoping a miracle would save me from writing this post.

I so wanted Deedra Abboud to pull off a stunning upset, even though I knew it couldn’t happen.

But reality has arrived. Kyrsten Sinema is the nominee for U.S. Senate of the Democratic Party.

And as soon as I receive my ballot in the mail in October, I’ll be connecting that broken bar next to her name. It’ll be painful. I’ll undoubtedly throw up a little in the back of my mouth as I do it. But there will be no hesitation on my part. Sanity demands no less.

And if you want to maximize our chance of avoiding disaster, you’ll be joining me.

I will do this with no delusions about how Sinema will vote. I know each vote she casts will be an exercise in abject cynicism, with the sole consideration being how it impacts her own political future, principle be damned. I know she’ll vote to repeal the estate tax on billionaires and to let Wall Street thieves run wild. I get that.

But it’s not about how she will vote; it’s about who she’ll caucus with and about avoiding the alternative, Martha McSally. Whatever the possibilities are to wrest control of the Senate from Mitch McConnell, we need to maximize them. If that chance is a mere one percent, we need to pull for it. If it’s 99 percent, we need to make certain there is no surprise. And as tragically flawed as Sinema is, McSally, who repeatedly pledges fealty to Trump, is a thousand times worse. Yeah, I know, the lesser of two evils is still evil. But when choosing between a shoplifter and an axe murderer, choose the shoplifter. It’ll be a choice you can live with.

For Arizona progressives who resent the condescension of establishment hacks stupidly blaming you for Hillary Clinton’s loss, when any moron could figure out that the election was lost in the rust belt, I feel your pain. But the election isn’t about those establishment hacks, no matter how much their condescension tempts you to lash out and vote Green or stay home. This is not 2016. This time, Arizona is the epicenter. Sinema’s success in November is crucial. Arizona very well could decide the balance of political power in the U.S. Senate.

And there is nothing remotely as important as constraining the power of Donald Trump. Nothing.

So, when you receive your ballot, get it over with right away, lest you not give in to the temptation to send a message, or forget to vote early, then get whacked with some emergency on Election Day.

And if you wake up feeling a bit cheapened on November 7th, you can find redemption by gearing up for the 2024 primary. It’ll be here before you know it.

Scriber weighs in: If you stay home, you get McSally. If you vote Green or Libertarian, you get McSally. You can continue to be a progressive, but you need to get practical. She “who repeatedly pledges fealty to Trump, is a thousand times worse” than Sinema. Here are some samples of what I’ve posted in the recent past.

From my May 21, ,2018 post: In Election 2018 ‘The Democrats are coming.’ But which ones and how Democratic? I reviewed the reasons for thinking badly of Sinema, concluding:

So, do with this what you will. But remember 167. That’s the number of Democrats who were angered by some of then Rep. Ron Barber’s votes who stayed home in 2014 and thereby were complicit in getting McSally the CD2 seat. Which she kept in 2016. And which may now be her path to the Senate. And then the Presidency.

If you don’t like Sinema for Senate (and there are good reasons why you should not), what are you going to do come November? Are you (oh, hell, we) willing to accept McSally or Kelli Ward or Joe Arpaio over Sinema?

From my June 13, 2018 post: Research report – Krysten Sinema’s votes reveal progressive values.

For Sinema’s record in the U. S. House, I used 538’s Tracking Congress In The Age Of Trump. An updating tally of how often every member of the House and the Senate votes with or against the president. One measure is “how often a member votes in line with Trump’s position.” Sinema scores 57.3% and is the third highest Democrat in the House in voting with Trump.

However, that percentage is misleading. Here is why. The percentage includes lots of bills that provide stop-gap funding to keep the government running or that deal with other budgetary matters. Votes for these kinds of routine bills will tend to inflate the percentage score – assuming we all want to keep our government running. (Disclosure: I’ve used that percentage score to criticize other candidates before. Now I have to reevaluate that practice.)

Instead of using the overall percentage we need to look at votes on legislation that matter to progressives, for example, denying funding for Planned Parenthood, punishing sanctuary cities, increasing the availability of guns, repeal of Dodd-Frank, and repeal of regulations that provide for clean air and water. I pulled the records for 33 such bills from January 1, 2017 to present. I counted the number of instances in which Sinema voted against legislation supported by Trump. Her score was 85% opposed to Trump’s position.

You might ask how good is that score. To establish bounds on that measure I used the same method to compute the progressive scores for Raul Grijalva (AZ CD 3) and Martha McSally (AZ CD2). Grijalva scored a perfect 100% opposed to Trump’s positions and McSally, voting almost entirely with Trump on everything, scored 3%. (By the way, Trump’s score on the same measure was a perfect 0%.)

At the time of this writing, it appears that a likely match-up for the AZ U. S. Senate seat will be between Sinema and McSally. When it comes to deciding on how to vote, if you want ideological purity, you could point to the difference between Sinema and Grijalva (100% – 85% = 15%) and stay home. But if you want to flip that seat held by Republican Jeff Flake to a Democrat, you should focus on the difference between Sinema’s progressive score vs. that of McSally (85% – 3% = 82%) and Get Out to Vote.