Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer (N.Y.) is facing the toughest fight of his Senate leadership career amid sharp attacks from his party’s base over his vote to advance a House Republican-drafted funding bill.
Senate Democratic colleagues say that Schumer, who is 74 years old, isn’t going anywhere as party leader, but they’re questioning his decisionmaking in a way they haven’t during his previous eight years as leader.
Multiple senators complained about the lack of a clear strategy from their leadership heading into last week’s standoff with Senate and House Republicans over the House-passed funding bill, according to sources familiar with the sometimes heated discussions within the Senate Democratic Caucus.
The legislation cut $15 billion from nondefense programs and didn’t include guardrails to slow Elon Musk’s assault on the federal bureaucracy.
Sen. Chris Murphy (Conn.), a rising Democratic star who has led the faction of Democratic senators calling for tougher tactics to resist President Trump, says he still supports Schumer as leader but warned that the party needs to show more urgency.
Asked Sunday by “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker if Schumer is the “best person” to lead Senate Democrats, Murphy said “he can lead the caucus” but cautioned “we need to have a conversation inside the caucus about whether we are willing to stand up to Republicans.”
Murphy told The Hill that Senate Democrats risk becoming “irrelevant if we don’t use our power on cloture to demand that we have a seat at the table” on upcoming fights this summer and fall over raising the debt ceiling and funding the government.
“We obviously have to make sure that we aren’t cut out of negotiations in the future,” he said.
Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) said Democrats have “a lot of soul-searching” to do regarding strategy and tactics.
Schumer has faced criticism — albeit indirectly — from a prominent member of his leadership team, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who declared after the disappointing 2024 election that Democrats were no longer the party of the working class.
Sanders accused Democrats in November of abandoning the working class, and he accused party leaders of defending the “status quo.” He also led opposition to the House-passed funding bill, saying it would “literally take food out of the mouths of hungry children, take health care away from seniors, and give a huge tax break to the wealthiest people on the planet.”
Many Democrats were outraged by Schumer’s vote to advance the Republican spending bill, which Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a leading progressive, called a betrayal.
Calling it a “huge slap in the face,” she said vulnerable Democrats in districts that Trump won in 2024 risked their seats to vote against the bill only to watch 10 Democratic senators “acquiesce” to the Republican legislation.
The backlash was so intense that Schumer postponed a publicity tour scheduled for this week to promote his new book, “Antisemitism in America: A Warning,” due to what his publicity team called “security concerns.”
Even aside from last week’s battle, key Democrats are growing disenchanted with the party’s ability to connect with voters — especially white voters without college degrees.
Former Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-Ohio), who lost his seat in last year’s election despite Senate Democrats and their allies pouring tens of millions of dollars into his race, warned earlier this month that the Democratic Party’s reputation had become “toxic.”
“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 wrote on the social platform X.
Schumer responded to these criticisms in a New York Times interview.
He acknowledged that the Democratic Party had “lost” their reputation with many voters as the party of the working class but insisted it wasn’t because its values had changed but because its messaging had failed to connect with too many Americans.
“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.
Back in Washington, some Democratic lawmakers are privately grumbling over what many in their base view as the Democratic leadership’s feeble response to Trump’s agenda.
Schumer’s press conferences vowing to resist Trump’s agenda earlier this year have been mocked by Democratic commentators on television and on social media.
Comedian Jon Stewart last month pleaded with Democrats to “stop f—ing trotting Schumer out there every time Trump traverses into the unreal,” taking a shot at a Schumer presser in which he used an avocado and Corona beer as props to illustrate his points about the economic impact of Trump’s tariffs.
Inside the Capitol, some Democrats are calling for Schumer to come up with a better game plan to counter partisan must-pass bills coming from the House.
Critics within the party said that Schumer’s strategy last week appeared to be simply hoping that the partisan funding bill wouldn’t make it out of the House.
But some Democratic senators, notably Sen. John Fetterman (Pa.), thought it was likely that Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) would muster enough votes to pass the bill.
Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.), the ranking member of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), the ranking member of the Budget Committee, took the lead in urging colleagues to vote against the House funding bill after it passed the lower chamber on Tuesday.
They did so even after Schumer made clear to his Democratic colleagues in private conversations that he wanted to avoid a government shutdown at all costs.
Schumer later argued on the floor that even though he thought the House-passed bill was “terrible,” it was still a better option than allowing the government to shut down.
“Allowing Donald Trump to take even much more power via a government shutdown is a far worse option,” he warned.
Some Democratic senators who split with Schumer over his decision to help Republicans pass a partisan funding bill acknowledge that he may have made the right call. They concede that it could have played into President Trump’s and Musk’s plan to slash federal programs had the government shut down Saturday.
And some Democratic senators are relieved that Schumer and his close allies, including Senate Democratic Whip Dick Durbin (Ill.) and Sen. Brian Schatz (Hawaii), took the tough votes to advance the spending bill so they didn’t have to.
But there’s growing frustration among Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill that they’re out of step with much of America.
Democratic lawmakers have said for months that the results of the 2024 election, in which they lost control of the White House and Senate, shows their party is failing to connect with voters in a fundamental way.
After last week’s bruising battle, some Democratic senators say it’s time to start thinking about who will succeed Schumer.
But even while Democratic senators start to mull a new generation of leadership, they emphasize that Schumer is likely to stay in his job through 2028, when he will be up for reelection at the age of 78.
Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D-Minn.), the chair of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, and Schatz, who is deputy Democratic conference secretary, are two lawmakers poised to move up the leadership ladder — as is Murphy, who spearheaded the negotiation of a bipartisan border security package last year.
But Klobuchar, 64, who ran for president in 2020 and gained more traction than many Democratic strategists expected, and Murphy, 51, may be harboring presidential ambitions.
And Schatz has a lower public profile than many of his Democratic colleagues, even though he is a prolific presence on social media.
Some Democratic lawmakers think it’s time for a “new generation” of leadership, which means that Murray, who is 74, and Durbin, who is 80 and considered likely to retire in 2026, are not first-choice candidates to replace Schumer.
Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.), 66, who brokered a deal on Friday with Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to fix a provision in the House bill that would cut close to $1 billion from the District of Columbia’s budget, has been floated as a dark horse future candidate for leader. Van Hollen has kept a low profile in the Senate, but he held leadership positions in the House.
Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), 64, who led House prosecutors during Trump’s first impeachment trial in 2021 and represents the nation’s biggest state, is also seen as a rising star who could vault to the top of the leadership ranks once he has time to establish himself in the Senate.
He was just elected to the upper chamber last year, but colleagues are already touting him as someone with huge leadership potential.
