There was a decent primary opponent against him, and he got hammered. I thought it would be close, but he got creamed.
Let’s address this one by one, because amazingly some of this stuff is delusion.
1) Reid faced problems holding 60 votes together when putting Obamacare through. He crafted special clauses and amendments to hold Ben Nelson, the Dem senator from Nebraska in line. This was before Kennedy’s death. He got his 60 by buying off Nelson with projects for Nebraska. The Omaha district is now almost blue (Obama won it in one of his elections).
2) The votes the GOP enacted to repeal Obamacare were, of course, never signed by Obama. They passed because the Dems in the Senate knew it would not be signed and so they didn’t even bother to filibuster. Now, they would. And we have only 52 votes so we can’t cloture that filibuster. We can revote that and have it die in the Senate, but pointless.
3) The theory that you can have the Vice President ignore the Parliamentarian and have all imaginable bills be Reconciliation bills is clearly bizarre and just a way to kill the filibuster. Conservative senators will not support that. Without the filibuster we’d have a single payer healthcare program in the US right now. Only the filibuster prevented a single payer plan from coming out of the 2010 House and getting passed by the Senate by maybe 54 votes. We have the filibuster to thank for preventing that and many other left wing things that might have been rammed through.
4) Trump is right. Obamacare has to be repealed to the extent it can be or those Rust Belt voters who voted for Obama twice and gave us the chance to get what we can will turn their backs on just another array of politicians who lied to them.
5) You really have to go back and read about 2009/10. The far left wing in the House were enraged. Pelosi was monumentally incompetent. She sent a single payer plan to the Senate. She was completely ignorant of the the Senate’s cloture rules and how they could not lose even one senator or drop under 60. Several moderate Dem Senators would not approve a single payer plan. They would be under 60. When her people heard this, THEY RAGED. They couldn’t get what they wanted. They could only get the lesser Obamacare program, which they thought was STUPID. They could not believe they couldn’t have single payer NHS.
6) They voted, they passed Obamacare, and all those hardcore leftists circled the wagons around it. They defended it against all attacks. Whatever can get passed this year will be similarly defended by the far right wing types.
That happened the first time we tried to primary Eric Cantor in 2012. We got him out in 2014.