Representative Krysten Sinema has been operating a consultancy with Chad Campbell, a former legislator who supported legislation favored by the industry and later became a lobbyist for payday lenders, since 2007.

Senator Krysten Sinema has shared on the campaign trail about her impoverished upbringing, including a time when her family resided in an abandoned gas station without basic utilities. She often references her own dependence on government-subsidized school meals to survive.

Despite her difficult childhood experiences, Sinema has been an advocate for businesses that prey on low-income individuals, with payday lending companies being a major beneficiary of her support. These lenders have contributed more campaign funds to Sinema than any other sitting senator.

Prior to accepting tens of thousands of dollars in campaign contributions from payday lending companies during her congressional races, Sinema collaborated with an occasional ally of the industry to establish their own business.

In 2007, Senator Krysten Sinema established a consulting firm with her friend and former Democratic state Representative, Chad Campbell. Campbell was a key supporter of industry-backed bills in the legislature and later became a lobbyist for the payday loan industry in Arizona.

Sinema’s business partnership with Campbell foreshadowed her political transformation, which saw her shift from her progressive roots as a Green Party member and anti-war activist to embrace the very industries she previously criticized.

The consulting firm, Forza Consulting LLC, is still in operation, according to Arizona LLC filings. Although there is no public indication of corporate activities, Sinema and Campbell are the firm’s principals, with Sinema listed as the manager, alongside former Democratic state Representative David Lujan.

Sinema and her spokesperson, Hannah Hurley, both stated that the consulting firm, Forza Consulting, formed in the early 2000s, but did not engage in any business activities.

Despite this, Sinema consistently took positions in Congress that aligned with payday lenders. These lenders charge high fees for short-term loans with interest rates that can reach 400 percent. These loans are known as predatory and are banned or restricted in 18 states due to the possibility of leading borrowers into a cycle of debt.

According to a 2016 report by the Center for American Progress, the majority of payday and title loans result in another loan, with 80 percent being rolled over or leading to an additional loan within two weeks. This is due to borrowers being unable to afford other essential expenses. The median payday loan borrower is in debt for over six months, and 15 percent of new loans will result in a series of at least 10 additional loans.

ARIZONA HAS SEEN a decade-and-a-half-long fight over payday lending. The lending firms, often storefront operations, operated in the state thanks to a long-standing interest rate exemption. As the expiration date on the exemption approached, both industry advocates and opponents ramped up their work on the issue.

Among the earlier salvos was a 2007 bill in the Legislature that would allow payday lenders to continue operating in the state with capped interest rates and require additional screening measures. Opponents of the bill said it didn’t go far enough and left too much discretion in lenders’ hands. Its proponents dubbed the bill a thorough reform effort that provided necessary loan options for those facing difficult circumstances.

“Saying that people who are in hard financial straits need access to this kind of credit is sort of like giving a starving person rotten food,” Whitney Barkley-Denney, senior policy counsel at the Center for Responsible Lending, told The Intercept. “It makes them sicker than they were in the first place. People who borrow with payday loans find themselves facing bankruptcy, foreclosure, and worse. So the solution to the problems so many people face is higher wages and better jobs, instead of loans that sink them further and further into financial insecurity.”

Among the supporters of the 2007 bill were a lobbyist representing payday lending interests, as well as Chad Campbell, then a state representative from Phoenix. The bill ultimately failed in the Legislature.

In 2008, another attempt by the loan industry to maintain its foothold in the state died at the hands of Arizona voters. Industry groups spent millions promoting Proposition 200, a ballot measure which would have rolled back interest rate caps set to take effect in 2010. Arizona voters defeated the measure by a 3-to-2 margin.

After 2010, the payday lending industry was forced to comply with newly lowered rates, but that didn’t stop loan providers from launching a renewed effort to claw back business.

In 2017, two years after Campbell left the Arizona Legislature, industry-backed workaround bills were advanced to create new loan options that function similarly to payday loans but with names like “flex loans” and “consumer lines of credit.” One bill that would have allowed loans with interest rates exceeding 100 percent was on a fast track to passing in 2017 but was eventually held at bay.

Around that time, Campbell began lobbying for payday loan interests. He was registered in Arizona between 2017 and 2020 as a lobbyist for the Arizona Financial Choice Association, an industry trade group advocating on behalf of the lenders and a chief backer of the failed 2008 ballot measure to allow payday lenders to keep operating. Campbell insisted that the group did not represent payday lenders.

“There is no payday lending. It’s not payday lending,” he said. “I actually helped kill payday lending in Arizona when I was in the Legislature, so I wouldn’t work for payday lending.”

The Arizona Financial Choice Association had come under fire in 2016, when Democratic state Rep. Debbie McCune Davis called for an investigation into its letter drive to support legislation backing the creation of “flex loans.” McCune Davis said that many of the signatories on letters delivered to state politicians didn’t understand the content of the bill, and in some cases, didn’t even understand what the letter was for. “Kyrsten did not engage in anything related to the interests of Arizona Financial Choice Association with Chad Campbell,” said Hurley.

“I was working on a compromise piece of legislation at the state level with the industry at the time,” Campbell said, discussing the period he was registered to lobby.

“By law, I had registered as a lobbyist because that’s how it works here,” Campbell said. “I just had to do it as a formality. But I never worked at the federal level with them in any capacity.”

“So, like I said, this had nothing to do with Kyrsten Sinema in any way shape or form.” Campbell said.

Community Choice Financial, one of the payday lenders represented by the Arizona Financial Choice Association, has donated $21,000 dollars to Sinema since 2016.

The donations were part of Sinema’s haul from payday lenders. She has received the most money of any active senator from the industry, $168,000, and comes in third as among lifetime industry recipients, behind Sens. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and Harry Reid, D-Nev.

Forza Consulting LLC, the firm Sinema started with Campbell, has not appeared on any of Sinema’s U.S. House or Senate disclosure forms, despite the company’s active status. Another consultancy she incorporated, Sinema Consulting LLC, does appear in disclosures.

SINEMA AND CAMPBELL served together in the Arizona House of Representatives until 2010, a period that encompassed the first three years after Forza Consulting LLC’s founding in 2007. Sinema went on to the state Senate, then U.S. Congress, while Campbell stayed on in the state House for five more years.

Since their time in state politics, the pair have remained friends. Campbell, for his part, has consistently defended Sinema’s rightward turn. “She believes in the rules and believes in the processes, and she’ll figure out how to use those rules and processes to her advantage to get things done and bring people into alignment with her goals,” he told Mother Jones in 2021. Campbell has also sung Sinema’s praises to The Associated Press and the New York Times.

The two also have more recent financial ties. In 2014, Campbell was listed as a board member of the Arizona-based political mobilization organization Leading for Change. The same year, Sinema received more than $3,000 in income from the organization — a fee for leading a training. Campbell said he did not facilitate the job and that Sinema was connected to the organization long before he joined the board. “Kyrsten introduced Chad to the Leading for Change non-profit,” said Hurley.

Since ascending to the U.S. Senate, Sinema has used her increasingly powerful vote to advocate for concessions to the private equity industry, block filibuster reform, and doom progressives’ top priorities.

Last month, she split with the Democratic Party to once again become an independent — signaling that, in the new Congress, her political alignment may stray even further from the liberals of the Democratic Party.

Long before her departure from the party, Sinema consistently rebuffed consumer protection advocates’ attempts to regulate the payday lending industry and repeatedly championed lending groups. She attempted to block reform efforts and sponsored legislation to shield loan companies from federal oversight.

Sinema’s actions in 2016 drew criticism from progressives when she signed a letter with Republicans condemning the work of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) in regulating payday lenders. Shortly after sending the letter, she received over $10,000 in donations from the payday lending industry. Sinema also voted against an amendment that sought to defund the CFPB’s efforts to target predatory lenders, and co-sponsored the Consumer Protection and Choice Act, which aimed to shield payday lenders from the CFPB’s authority. These actions damaged her relationship with progressives, including former representative Barney Frank, who accused Sinema of misrepresenting his support for her efforts to replace the CFPB with a bipartisan commission. Frank wrote a letter stating that he was disappointed in Sinema for joining right-wing Republicans in misrepresenting his position.