We don’t have a parliamentary system where a party can kick out an elected member for not supporting the party’s agenda and replace them with someone else. Each member is individually elected to represent their state or district. For better or for worse, they get to decide what is best for their constituents and their constituents get to respond in the next election.

Joe Manchin was the major impediment in 2021-2023. He mostly supported the party’s agenda but had some sticking points. He had to be onboard with whatever passed given the razor thin majority.

I saw all these screeds about how he should be kicked out of the party, but the objective reality is there is very little you can do to pressure a centrist Democrat from a state that voted for Trump by 50 points. The only option available was to placate him and come to a compromise (which he ultimately agreed to for major climate change reduction investment).

The reality is that the Democratic Party is not monolithic, it has some centrists who don’t support some of the more ambitious goals of the party. If you want bigger action, you have to have a bigger majority. Slim majorities give small wings of the party outsized influence on policy.

The thing you have to keep reminding yourself is just how disconnected from politics the average voter is. We’ve seen 2 full months of every day bringing some new chaos, but for most Americans, the only major things that have happened are:

1. Elon Musk is firing lots of government workers
2. Trump is enacting tariffs

Everything else is just noise to them and they filter it out. Until things really start to affect them directly, apathetic Trump voters who thought voting for him would magically turn the economy back to what it was before Covid are going to assume things are improving (because they already were before the election, they were just in a sour mood and refused to admit it).