Senate Democrats won their majority on Tuesday. By Thursday, a bloc of their own incoming members was making it plain they don’t want Chuck Schumer running it.
Several senators-elect, including Adam Hamilton of Kansas and Troy Jackson of Maine, have said they won’t back Schumer for majority leader, Fox News reported. Schumer, D-N.Y., has led Senate Democrats as both majority and minority leader since 2017 and is still seen as the favorite. But many of the newcomers are, in Fox’s words, “tepid, at best” about giving him another term.
Hamilton, the moderate megachurch pastor who unseated Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., and flipped Kansas for the first time in nearly a century, was blunt. “I mean no disrespect for Chuck Schumer, but we need new leadership,” he told CNN in September. “We need new younger leadership, young blood.” Like other Democrats this cycle, he argued the party needed “fresh ideas and fresh leadership.”
“In Kansas, Chuck Schumer is a liability for Democrats,” Hamilton said, “and we’ve got to have leaders that can unite us, bring us together, not just Democrats, but bring together Democrats and Republicans to solve real problems.”
Jackson, a former Maine state senator, said Election Day changed nothing for him. “I told Schumer that I’m going to, you know, support somebody else,” he told reporters just before the vote. “So it’s no different now.”
They are not alone. Fox counted senators-elect Julianna Stratton of Illinois, Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota among the newcomers who “aren’t all in for Schumer.” Progressives including El-Sayed have floated Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., as an alternative, though Van Hollen has said he is “kicking the tires” on a 2028 run.
Schumer insists the revolt isn’t about him. “The issue is not me,” he told reporters Wednesday. “I’ll be re-elected as majority leader, but the issue is focusing on the American people and what they want.”
The math may still favor him. Leadership elections are expected later this year, and Schumer needs only a majority of a caucus that stands at 54 seats and could grow if Mississippi and Alaska keep leaning Democratic. A Democratic aide familiar with Van Hollen’s thinking told Fox the senator believes “the caucus needs to have an honest and open conversation about how we move an agenda forward that reflects the will of the American people.” The aide added that Van Hollen has “made it clear that the new Democratic majorities need to use their power to push a proactive, economic agenda.”
Still, a party fresh off a midterm sweep can’t agree on who should hold the gavel. The progressive and moderate wings that won together are already pulling in opposite directions, and the man who has held them together for nearly a decade is hearing from his own new colleagues that he is a liability.
Source: foxnews.com
