Gallego calls Sinema’s bluff
By 
Good for him:
Rep. Ruben Gallego announced he will run for the U.S. Senate in Arizona on Monday, setting up a potential three-way race in the battleground state in 2024 that poses a threat to independent Sen. Kyrsten Sinema’s hold on the seat.
Gallego, a Marine veteran who has served in the House since 2015, announced his candidacy in a video in English and Spanish that stressed his military service and experience growing up as a first-generation American.
“The rich and the powerful, they don’t need more advocates,” Gallego said in the video, which shows him addressing veterans at Guadalupe American Legion Post 124. “It’s the people that are still trying to decide between groceries and utilities that need a fighter for them.”
Gallego also took direct aim at Sinema in a statement, saying she “abandoned Arizona” and has “repeatedly broken her promises, and fought for the interests of big pharma and Wall Street at our expense.”
The thing is, Sinema — an extremely unpopular figure whose signature ideas (such as “lower taxes for hedge fund managers”) have no mass constituency at all. She is not only drawing dead in a three-way race, she would be a prohibitive underdog in a two-way race.
SInema is a dilettante and I’m guessing she doesn’t really want to be a senator anymore and probably isn’t going to want to be utterly humiliated once polls of a 3-person race start appearing. But whatever she does, Sinema is now such a bad candidate Democrats have nothing to lose, and Gallego making it clear that he’s running early makes is more likely that Sinema just goes away to be a finance industry lobbyist or whatever.