Great post in full, well worth reading.
The job of an elected official isn’t to do whatever they want. It’s to figure out what the people want (or need), and to deliver that, in accordance with principles and ethics. This is a surprisingly selfless expectation: sometimes the right thing to do is the opposite of what you want to do. And it can be hard to figure out what’s right, which is why we have debates, and why we listen to our opponents in those debates, even when we have a majority and they’re “merely” the opposition.