Kyrsten Sinema announces she won’t run for Senate seat after leaving Democratic Party

Kyrsten Sinema’s short but lively time in the US Senate is coming to an end.

The one-term senator from Arizona announced on Tuesday that she would serve the remainder of her term before stepping down from the Senate at the end of the year, rather than run for re-election. Following her win in a nail-biter election as a Democrat in 2018, Ms Sinema joined the Senate in January of 2019.

In that one term, she would become one of two holdout senators in the chamber who worked to thwart Joe Biden’s Build Back Better agenda, while also emerging as an opponent to the idea of killing the Senate’s fillibuster rule to allow the passage of voting rights legislation. She would go on to drop her party affiliation, becoming an independent, though she continued to caucus with Senate Democrats to protect the party’s majority in the chamber.

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