Although Democrats are set to pick up likely dozens of seats in the U.S. House come the conclusion of the midterms next week, the outcomes in U.S. Senate races are less certain. One particularly tight contest has been unfolding in Arizona, where Democrat Kyrsten Sinema is challenging Republican Martha McSally to replace the retiring Jeff Flake. In the aftermath of a recent poll putting McSally ahead, Green Party candidate Angela Green has dropped out and thrown her support behind Sinema.
She commented, in part:
‘I want them to vote for a better Arizona — and that would be for Kyrsten Sinema and the Democratic Party. There are a lot of reasons I can’t support the other candidate, but the main reason is that [Sinema is] more in line with what my political agenda is, what I’m looking to do to help Arizona become more green again honestly, and after watching the debate, I’ve seen that Sinema’s stances on a lot of things are very similar to mine.’
Watch below.
BREAKING AZ Green Party’s U.S. Senate candidate Angela Green tells #12News she’s dropping out & throwing support to @kyrstensinema. Green was polling up to 6% in toss-up race. https://t.co/WwxN7M13b0 #AZSEN pic.twitter.com/GA4tfSyAoO
— BrahmResnik (@brahmresnik) November 1, 2018
Although she was running as part of a minor party, Green wasn’t just a nobody in the race, registering some three to six percent support in some polls. FiveThirtyEight estimated her late Thursday to be on track to receive two percent of the vote once votes are tallied next week, while their model has Sinema finishing just barely ahead of McSally with a 3 in 5 chance of winning. Still, a recent poll has McSally ahead of Sinema by seven percent, so one can never be too careful, and Green’s endorsement could prove a helpful boost for the Democratic contender.
Green’s party and others like it have been lambasted in the past for supposedly taking votes away from progressive candidates in the much higher profile Democratic Party. For instance, in the 2016 U.S. presidential election in Florida, Donald Trump finished with some 113,000 more votes than Hillary Clinton — and while the Green Party’s presidential candidate, Jill Stein, didn’t personally procure enough votes to fill that gap, Libertarian Gary Johnson did. In Michigan in that same election, Stein definitely got enough votes to surpass the margin Trump led Clinton with — and both Florida and Michigan were crucial to the eventual president’s electoral college victory.
Stein, on a personal level, has distinguished herself through other means, spearheading incessant activism along with her party that has earned them supporters and detractors. Green, though, down in Arizona, seems concerned with leveraging that activism to craft a path forward for the people of her state and the country at large.
Sinema’s race is a somewhat rare, somewhat bright spot for Democrats running for the U.S. Senate this year. While in Florida, Democrat Bill Nelson also maintains an edge — in Missouri, Tennessee, and Nevada, Democratic candidates’ futures are in doubt.
In the U.S. House, the situation remains a lot brighter, with FiveThirtyEight estimating dozens of Democratic pickups incoming. That will wrest control of the entirety of Congress away from President Donald Trump’s party and help put up a roadblock ahead of his continuously repugnant agenda.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
