Why Kyrsten Sinema left the Democratic Party

A FiveThirtyEight article on Arizona Senator Kyrsten Sinema changing political parties extensively cited research from Antoine Yoshinaka. In a study of party switchers from 1950 to 2014, Yoshinaka found that a member of Congress’s voting record didn’t do a good job of predicting party switchers on its own, even though party switchers were more likely to be out of sync with their party ideologically. “Yoshinaka found that ideological disagreement usually had to occur alongside a desire to run for higher office or to gain a more valuable committee post to produce a greater likelihood of changing parties,” according to the article.