Kyrsten Sinema is my new Congresswoman, having defeated her Republican opponent Vernon Parker by over 6000 votes in CD9, as of the latest count. Her decisive victory didn’t even require Parker saying something stupid about rape pregnancies! As y’all know, back during the primary I was a Nervous Nellie about Sinema and supported another candidate. I haven’t been happier to be wrong about something in a long time (and I really need to do something about my nerves). Here are the reasons I feel Sinema prevailed so handily last week:

1. Kyrsten Sinema is a well-known and well-liked politician in Arizona, especially among Democrats. She built up a solid record of public service in the state legislature on education, health care, reproductive issues, and environmental protection, in addition to being a strong public voice against the harsh Republican agenda. She was not without her critics, from the Left and Right, but obviously well more than half the voters in CD9 trusted her abilities and record more than the complaints of her detractors.

2. Sinema is an indefatigable campaigner with a mighty fundraising Rolodex, which a Daily Kos diarist described as “Liberal Activists Meet Arizona Insiders”. It’s worth noting that the majority of Sinema’s contributions came from within Arizona. Her campaign attracted hundreds of enthusiastic volunteers who made tens of thousands of voter contacts. She and her campaign worked their asses off and they deserve this victory.

3. When you run ads portraying the Democratic candidate in a Dem-leaning district as a radical socialist communist housewife-hater approximately 987,000 times a day, it may have the opposite effect of what you intend. Republicans poured money into the Phoenix market to defeat Sinema with negative but it looks like it didn’t work. Maybe, just maybe, the Democratic voters who are a slim majority in this district, are getting tired of the politicians they respect (up to and including President Obama, who got 52% of the vote in the region in 2008) constantly being denigrated as anti-American scum. It’s even possible that a good number of this group of voters, who comprise both registered Democrats and left-leaning independents, take the endless and vitriolic conflation of “Democrats” and “liberals” with all things evil and unsavory a tad personally. While laughing about the silliness of it along with Comedy Central and Bill Maher, of course. I sure got an extra kick out of marking Kyrsten Sinema’s name on my ballot when I thought of that.

I’m off to the Big Easy tomorrow and will be there until Sunday. I’ll be too busy partying uh I mean “paying careful attention to property tax lien seminars” to blog.