U.S. Sen. Kyrsten Sinema answers questions from Danny Seiden, the president and CEO of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, at the business group’s 2022 Update from Capitol Hill event on April 12, 2022. /Photo by Gage Skidmore | Flickr/CC BY-SA 2.0
The Democratic senator has been a top corporate ally, opposing a repeal of Trump-era business tax cuts
BY: DILLON ROSENBLATT | Arizona Mirror
At the same time that Arizona Democratic Sen. Kyrsten Sinema was standing in opposition to Democratic efforts to raise taxes on corporations, she was raking in campaign cash from many of the companies lobbying against the tax increases — corporate PACs have given Sinema more than $2.5 million since 2021, more than one out of every three dollars she’s raised.
An Arizona Mirror analysis of campaign finance reports between Jan. 1, 2021 and March 31, 2022 for both Sinema’s personal campaign and her leadership political action committee, Getting Stuff Done, show that her prodigious fundraising is powered by corporate money.
Her reports over that span shows she accepted just under $2 million for her campaign and $567,000 for her PAC. (Her PAC has drawn media scrutiny for spending thousands of dollars on wine, paying for a personal trip to Europe and a $34,500 payment to rent a resort in Sedona.) These numbers don’t reflect individual contributions from corporate executives or other employees at companies whose PACs gave her money.
In all, her campaign has raised more than $5.8 million in that same time, while her leadership PAC has brought in slightly less than $1.1 million. Her committees have received 36% of their combined money from corporate PACs.
Sinema received checks from businesses like Amazon, Honeywell, Intel and Merck, among many others, that have been actively fighting off Democratic efforts to reverse the 2017 tax cuts on businesses that Republicans passed while they were in power. Those groups are all part of The Business Roundtable, a coalition of prominent corporate leaders that argue increasing taxes is a threat to their future plans.
Sinema’s opposition to undoing those 2017 tax cuts is also a far cry from her campaign in 2018 against Martha McSally, when she attacked her opponent for supporting Donald Trump’s “huge tax breaks for the wealthy and large corporations at the expense of our middle class.”
Accepting millions of dollars from corporate PACs — mostly from pharmaceutical companies, public utilities, banks and hedge funds — puts her at odds with Mark Kelly, Arizona’s other senator.
