Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has been the target of scathing criticism from members of his own party after voting for a Republican-drafted stopgap spending bill that cut many nondefense programs, says things are looking good for the Democratic Party, which he says has “a real direction now.”
Schumer told The New York Times that President Trump’s agenda of slashing the federal government to pave the way for trillions of dollars in tax cuts has underscored the Democratic Party’s identity as the party of workers, even though some Democrats fear that’s no longer seen as true.
“I don’t think we have an authenticity problem,” Schumer told the Times’s Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
“We have a real direction now. I feel good about it,” the embattled leader proclaimed.
“First, you gotta look at who the Democratic Party is and who the Republican Party is,” he argued. “We are the party of working people. We feel that very, very strongly. That’s who we have always been.”
Some progressives, including Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), however, have warned the Democratic Party has drifted away from working-class Americans, citing that shift as why the party lost the White House and Senate in the 2024 election.
Sanders, the ranking member of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, accused Democrats in November of abandoning the working class and their party’s leaders of defending the “status quo.”
“It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them,” Sanders said in a statement after the election.
Brown argued on the social platform X earlier this month that “the Democratic Party’s reputation has become toxic” and that it no longer represented workers.
“We must reckon with how far our party has strayed from our New Deal roots. How we see ourselves — the party of the people, the party of the working class and the middle class — no longer matches up with what most voters think,” he said.
When Garcia-Navarro noted to Schumer that Americans don’t view the Democratic Party as representing workers, Schumer appeared to concede the point but asserted that it’s repositioning itself.
“That’s right, and that’s where we’re moving. That’s where we have to move,” he said.
Schumer argued the Democratic Party’s values never changed but that its messaging became muddled in recent years.
He acknowledged that his message that Republicans want to cut health care and other social services to pay for tax cuts for billionaires isn’t new, but he asserted that it drifted from Democrats’ focus and wasn’t emphasized as much as it should have been.
“We lost it,” he said. “We always cared about the working people. But in the last few years, while we did a lot for working people, here’s what we didn’t do: We didn’t tell people about it.
“We thought, just by legislating, people would know about it. They don’t!” he said, summing up what he sees as one of the party’s biggest mistakes while former President Biden was in office.
