I can’t overstate just how impressive the @KyrstenSinema win is for her, her team, Arizona activists, Arizona donors and the small cadre of people who have made it their mission to turn my home state blue
Six years ago, we ran a WAR HERO FORMER REPUBLICAN SURGEON GENERAL who had a life story so crazy inspiring that I thought it had to be fake when I first got approached about joining his campaign (it’s not, he’s legit in every way and I loved working for him)
We put everything into that race, and outperformed basically all expectations…and we still fell 4 points short. We were APPLAUDED at the time for getting that close…and we lost by 180,000 voters!!!
AZ Dems then got annihilated in 2014 with basically zero help from the outside. And in 2016, we were virtually alone again (Hillary’s effort was more for show, not a real investment) – though the @azdemparty ran a monster homegrown program led by then-Chair Alexis Tameron
That means when Sinema’s campaign was planning for 2018, they had to more or less build this whole thing from the ground up. No other serious Senate candidate faced that challenge anywhere else in the country.
They made believers out of the big national funders that invested in critical programs. And their performance made them an appealing investment for national independent expenditures (in a way we didn’t see to nearly the same degree in 2012).
Then, they ran a flawless race that really should be a case study in political discipline and execution. (Seriously, if you want to be in this business and be good, really dive into what they did at important moments of the race take a lot of notes)
There were A LOT of people who built the foundation of this win through decades of totally thankless and very tough work. But that foundation has (so far) more or less gotten us to an R+5 state, where normal Democratic candidates and campaigns should expect to lose.
(For those talking up the state turning “blue” from demographic shifts and voter registration alone, you’ll need to wait until at least 2022 or 2024)
The @KyrstenSinema campaign had a really narrow path to victory that would require them to do basically everything right. And they did it! That’s so insanely hard to do in this business!!!
For as long as I’ve been working in Arizona Democratic politics (it's been a while, the firm is named after a freaking cactus), we’ve been looking for the catalyst that would allow us to jump ahead of the demographic trends and get a breakthrough statewide win.
.@KyrstenSinema was that catalyst and her campaign broke through every barrier it faced.
I can’t applaud them or the tens of thousands of people who contributed time/money/effort to that race enough. A truly impressive and bad ass accomplishment.
