Let me ask you this:
How involved have you been with the Democratic Party on the electoral side? Have you ever run for office?
I have, and because of that I understand just how encompassing is a politician's party affiliation and party identity.
When I first was voting, I always registered as an Independent because I felt my actual party affiliation (in reality I've always been a Democrat) was anyone else's business, and I didn't understand that voting in primaries was at all important. At some point I understood why I should be voting in primaries, and changed my affiliation.
Or you might live in a state with open primaries, or a state that doesn't require party affiliation when you register to vote. More than once people here who live in one of those states posts something showing they don't realize how different in can be in another state. I live in New Mexico, and we have closed primaries. Which means if the party you're registered with doesn't have candidates in the primary, you don't get to vote in the primary. Recently some voters not registered either D or R, sued to force the state to open the primaries to all. They lost. You may well think they should have won, but they didn't, and it's not exactly a secret that we have closed primaries here, and in many other states.
So my essential point is that for politicians party affiliation goes far beyond the letter after their name, and is not something they change lightly. And most of the time making a change doesn't do any good.
Here's one way to think about it. No matter who you supported in the primaries last year, consider how different it would have been had Bernie Sanders been a registered Democrat all along. And assume he'd otherwise voted and done everything in his entire political life exactly as he has. It's clear that one of the reasons he did not gain the nomination was that a lot of people who might otherwise have supported and voted for him in the primaries, were very put off by is recent change. On this board, if it's at all representative of the rest of the country (which it's not, I know) many people made it extremely clear (and still do) that he was not a Democrat and therefore, despite anything else about him, was totally undeserving of their support. Never mind that he'd always caucused with Democrats. Never mind that he was always liberal and progressive. He always had the I after his name, not the D.
And although you're suggesting that there are Senators who perhaps won't be running again or who are from swing states might consider it, it's not like that. Again, at the level of serious involvement with electoral politics, as county chair, or precinct committee man or woman, let alone actually running for office, the party affiliation is central and crucial.
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