Phoenix (CNN) Alejandra Gomez worked tirelessly to get Democrats, including Sen. Kyrsten Sinema, elected in 2018. But now she feels betrayed.
The 39-year-old co-executive director of the community organizing group LUCHA went door to door in the sweltering Arizona heat in 2018, turning out the Democratic voters that helped get Sinema elected to the Senate. The work was arduous and the hours long, but Gomez and others believed deeply in the need to defeat Republican Martha McSally, who had aligned herself with then-President Donald Trump.
Her work paid off -- Sinema won by nearly 3 percentage points. But it is what happened next -- the Arizona Democrat has become one of the most unmovable roadblocks on Democratic priorities in Washington -- that has shocked people who considered themselves ardent Sinema supporters a few short years ago.
Gomez now has another label for the woman she helped elect: A wolf in sheep's clothing.
"What has happened is a complete slap in the face to our members, to the work they have done and to the change that they are trying to make in our communities," Gomez said. "If she is not part of the solution, she is part of the problem. And what we are seeing is that she is touting herself as a bipartisan leader, but we have yet to see where the bipartisanship stands. She has done nothing."
In an evenly divided Senate, each individual senator wields considerable power. But the bulk of that influence has fallen on the shoulders of Democratic senators like Sinema, willing to buck their party on key priorities. The positioning has elevated the senator's profile -- she is now often talked about nationally as someone President Joe Biden's administration must court and is at the center of talks over a sweeping infrastructure bill.
But back home, her refusal to support a number of Democratic priorities -- from getting rid of the filibuster to raising the minimum wage to $15-an-hour -- has created deep distrust with her party's base and even spurred groups like LUCHA to look for alternatives to run against her in the Democratic primary when she is up for reelection in 2024.
"We are prepared to support a viable candidate that is ready to actually stand for our communities," Gomez said.
When asked if challenging Sinema was worth the risk of losing the seat to a Republican, Gomez didn't flinch.
"We already have a Republican in that seat," she said.
From Green Party to Senate centrist
Sinema, whose Senate office declined to comment for this story, is partially a product of a politically changing Arizona.
The Democrat began her career as a member of the Arizona Green Party and became an outspoken proponent of liberal positions, including writing a letter to the Arizona Republic editor that "until the average American realizes that capitalism damages her livelihood while augmenting the livelihoods of the wealthy, the Almighty Dollar will continue to rule."
Her political career began with a loss -- she finished fifth in a five-person race for an Arizona House of Representative seat in 2002 -- but her fortunes began to turn around in 2004, when she joined the Democratic Party and won a state House seat. Sinema served in the position for six years before jumping to the Arizona Senate in 2010. The Arizona Democrat then won her US House seat two years later in 2012, and subsequentially won reelection fairly easily over the next four years.
During that time, Arizona -- once a Republican bastion that produced the likes of Barry Goldwater and John McCain -- began to shift to the left, spurred by a growing Latino population and voters moving to the desert from more liberal states like California and Illinois.
While Sinema's win in 2018, in many ways, signaled that political shift was coming, the would-be senator's politics began to move toward the center during her time in the House. The Arizona Democrat joined the Blue Dog Coalition, a group for Democrats who identify as centrists, and The Problem Solvers Caucus, a bipartisan group that fashions itself as dealmakers across party lines.