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The halls of Congress are filled with individuals who at some point abandoned almost everything they once believed in. More often than not, it’s a cushy, post-political corporate job or lobbying position that might have led them to give up on whatever led them to enter politics in the first place. Rarer is the person who’s done it out of pure, unbridled political ambition.

Such appears to be the case with Kyrsten Sinema, the Democratic senator from Arizona who recently went viral after cheerfully voting against a $15 minimum wage hike that would have helped reduce poverty for millions of children and working parents. Unlike fellow congressional spike strip Joe Manchin, Sinema doesn’t have a conflict of interest that might explain her vote; according to disclosures, her only extracurricular activity is a $25,000 a year adjunct teaching job at a local university. Nor has Sinema, who consistently ranks among the least wealthy members of Congress, appeared to pair her journey up the political ladder with a windfall in her own personal fortune.

So what is it that led Sinema to do a complete 180 on almost every position she ever took on almost any issue, from war to inequality to government spending? The answer is that she shifted right little by little, at each moment when her political ascent demanded it, a death by a thousand compromises that has turned Sinema into a right-wing Democrat who makes a virtue of defying not just the party’s Left but even its center.

Sinema Vérité

The powerful story of Sinema’s early life has been core to her political identity, however much the latter has shifted. Born into a middle-class household in Tucson in 1976, she was soon plunged into bitter poverty when the recession that closed out that decade put her father out of a job. He filed for bankruptcy while their home went into foreclosure, and Sinema, her brother, and her soon-to-be-divorced mother moved to Florida, finding themselves broke, homeless, and relying on food stamps and the charity of her stepfather’s Mormon church to survive.

As Sinema would often tell audiences, the family lived for years in a converted gas station, with no running water or electricity. What ultimately helped her escape these dire conditions was education. After finishing high school as valedictorian, she graduated college and became a social worker in a heavily immigrant- and refugee-populated part of Phoenix. A master’s in social work followed, as well as a law degree, which saw her work as a “defense attorney who represents murderers,” as she put it — a quote that would later haunt her.

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