Don't hammer that nail in Sen. Kyrsten Sinema's reelection coffin just yet

Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb on Tuesday became the first Republican candidate to jump into the race for U.S. Senate.

If you’re Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, you’re … thrilled.

“Popping the champagne corks, baby,” Chuck Coughlin, a longtime Republican political consultant, told me. “That’s exactly what she needs.”

Four months after being chased out of the Democratic Party, Sinema appears to be inching ever closer to making a run for reelection.

That which seemed impossible in December, now seems almost inevitable.

Sinema has all but announced another run

The Wall Street Journal on Friday reported that she had a staff retreat last week to lay out a timeline for a potential run as an independent.

Meanwhile, she was the keynote speaker on Thursday at the spring gathering of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, wherein she laid down what would be the centerpiece of her campaign.

“Everyone knows I’ve always been a pain in the ass to both parties, right? Nothing about that has changed,” she told the chamber crowd. “I’ve always been an independent voice for Arizona.”

That sounds like a winning message for a lot of fed-up voters in search of an alternative to the angry politics of the far right and the far left.

Progressive Gallego could be a tough sell

Already, she’s drawn Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego on the left. He’s the pride of the progressives, the likely Democratic nominee.

But there’s a reason why Sinema and Democratic Sen. Mark Kelly ran to the center during their respective Senate campaigns.

Contrary to how it may look, Arizona isn’t really a blue state.

We’re more black-and-blue, from all the embattled years of Kelli Ward and Kari Lake and Paul Gosar and Wendy Rogers and the rest of the far-right fanatics who have left a sizable number of moderate Republican and independent voters holding their noses and voting for Democrats.

Which brings me to what may well be Sinema’s ticket to a second term: the state of the Republican Party.

“The thing that will determine whether or not she can win is whether the Republicans nominate another polarizing candidate,” GOP consultant Chris Baker told me. “That’s the million-dollar question, the multimillion-dollar question. She already knows the Democrats are going to do it. Now, will the Republicans do it?”

What’s that old saying? Is the pope Catholic?

Republicans haven't learned from losses

It’s become clear the once-Grand Old Party has learned nothing from the last six years.

Martha McSally, Donald Trump, Martha McSally (again), Blake Masters, Kari Lake, Abe Hamadeh, Mark Finchem. Time and again, the GOP faithful in August nominate people who couldn’t get elected to run the dog pound come November.

Thus far, there’s no reason to think 2024 is going to be any different.

Lake remains a rock star on the right and will likely use her failed bid for governor to launch a Senate run.

'Always an independent': Sinema touts party change

Blake Masters and Jim Lamon, both of whom chased after Trump’s approval in the 2022 Senate race, might give it another whirl. Been there, seen that.

GOP has a void of moderate candidates

Karrin Taylor Robson is probably the Republicans’ best chance to claw back the Senate seat – just as she was their best chance of hanging onto Governor’s Office last year.

But Republican primary voters sent her packing, and several people inside her circle say she’s a no-go for next year’s Senate race.

Various (frustrated) Republican strategists tell me the party desperately needs to return to the days of yore, when mainstream Republicans ran – and routinely won all the big statewide races.

But the failures of 2022 – more specifically, the inability for a traditional Republican to win a Republican primary – have left a void of top-tier candidates for 2024.

Mark Lamb has strong MAGA ties

Which bring us to Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb, who announced Tuesday that he wants the job.

“I’m going give him the benefit of the doubt but I’m skeptical,” one glum strategist told me. “If someone said to you today, what kind of campaign do you think this guy’s going to run based upon his past, it seems pretty clear.”

Lamb, like Lake, is from the party’s hard right and like Lake, those strong MAGA ties could easily strangle him in a general election.

He’s tried to distance himself from the election denial crowd.

Asked whether significant fraud happened in the 2020 election, Lamb in February told a congressional panel, “As a law enforcement official, I have seen zero evidence that would show me that there was.”

But he’s been a fixture on the Trump circuit, right there among a who’s who of election deniers.

Is it any reason Sinema could win?

As the mob stormed the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Lamb joined a thousand or so Trump supporters at the state Capitol to protest the certification of the election for Joe Biden.

He helped found Protect America Now, a group that launched an initiative with True the Vote (think: the “2000 Mules” people), urging fellow sheriffs across the country to monitor last year’s midterm elections through surveillance of drop boxes and a hotline for reporting election fraud.

During a July Trump rally in Prescott for Lake and the rest of Trump’s Arizona slate, Lamb vowed sheriffs would do more to hold people accountable for violating election laws.

“We will not let happen what happened in 2020,” he said.

And because that was such a winning message in 2022, the Republican Party plans to repeat it in 2024.

And you wonder why Sinema thinks she could be reelected?

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: How Sen. Kyrsten Sinema could actually win as an independent