Scott Colom, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Mississippi, has been repeatedly asked a familiar hypothetical this election season: Would he support Chuck Schumer as Senate Democratic leader? When Fox News posed the question to him in October, few thought Colom stood a chance of taking down incumbent Republican Senator Cindy Hyde-Smith; he didn’t have much to lose by saying, in his deep-red state, “I don’t like that our party is represented by two people that live in the same borough.” But when MS NOW’s Jen Psaki asked Colom the same question several days ago, as it became increasingly clear that he had pulled off the most improbable victory in a midterm election full of improbable victories, he gave nearly the same answer: “It’s not a good thing that both leader Schumer and leader Jeffries both live in the same borough.”
It’s a clever answer, roping in his party’s other unpopular leader, House speaker-to-be Hakeem Jeffries, who lives about a 15-minute walk from Schumer in Brooklyn. Colom gave himself some wiggle room, which only seemed fair, given that Schumer recruited him for the race and dumped $2 million into the election to help push him over the line in its final weeks. Still, it captured the mood of the Democratic base. The party’s historic wave last week far exceeded expectations—but there is still an appetite for change. Many of the party’s voters and some of its elected officials in Congress, still upset at Schumer and Jeffries for their sluggish response to Trump’s abuses this term, don’t trust the two men to lead aggressively enough. Almost 60 percent of Democrats surveyed last month said they wanted “someone else” as their Senate leader, whereas just 22 percent wanted Schumer to stay in the job—hardly a ringing endorsement just before a massive electoral victory.
In other words, while the blue wave was partly a rejection of Trump and partly an endorsement of Democrats’ taking control of Congress, it’s hard to find evidence that any of it was driven by a desire to return Schumer and Jeffries, specifically, to power.
Colom is more circumspect than many of his fellow freshmen senators. Adam Hamilton, Abdul El-Sayed, Annie Andrews, Peggy Flanagan, James Talarico, Chris Pappas, and Juliana Stratton—all incoming Democratic senators—have all explicitly declined to support Schumer’s return as Senate majority leader. But so have some sitting senators. Bernie Sanders was unsurprisingly blunt on Tuesday, telling reporters, “I will not be supporting Chuck.” But Michigan Senator Elisa Slotkin, a noted moderate, has also come out against Schumer. “I’ve been very vocal that we need a new generation of leadership,” said at Crooked Media’s liberal Lollapalooza earlier this week. “We couldn’t have gotten a clearer signal than Tuesday.” (Granted, she’s also teasing her interest in the job.)
The case for changing horses at this moment is far from straightforward. The potential pitfalls are many, and obvious. The last thing the Democrats in Congress need right now, as they ride the unifying high of victory, is a nasty power struggle at the top that splinters the coalition. But it is clear that a significant portion of the Democratic base wants change and that the faith it lost in Schumer and Jeffries a year ago has not returned. The cleanest solution and the best path forward is for Schumer to step back.
That is partly because it seems unlikely that Jeffries will be replaced for a number of reasons. He is younger than Schumer, and would be the first Black speaker of the House. Any fight to succeed him would be fractious and likely would result in a similarly moderate figure in charge, thanks to the fact that the Democrats just won practically every district to the left of Atilla the Hun. Schumer, meanwhile, is 75, has been in this position before, and is synonymous with the party’s establishment.
Schumer could look at the political landscape and shrug off the petitions and unions and groups calling for his ouster. The electorate is often dismissed as ungrateful or ignorant; whatever you can say about Schumer, you can’t say that he held back the blue wave. But many Democratic politicians running for competitive Senate seats distanced themselves from him, and it was not merely performative. It was a key part of why they won: a signal both to their base and to persuadable voters that they were not stuck in the past. Schumer is, for many people who voted for Democrats last Tuesday, synonymous with everything they dislike about the party.
Still, the case for Schumer remaining leader is much more straightforward than the case for dumping him: Look at the scoreboard. The Democrats will most likely enter the 120th Congress with 56 senators, including ones from Kansas, South Carolina, and Mississippi. That’s a nine seat pickup, an extraordinary gain—and one that seemed downright impossible a year ago. Schumer, an election guru, played an important role in some of those pickups, handpicking Colom, a relative unknown in Mississippi, and coaxing Sherrod Brown out of retirement in Ohio. That’s pretty good. It’s also the kind of momentum you don’t want to disrupt without good reason.
But there is a good reason for dumping Schumer. He and Jeffries were both slow to pick up on their base’s anger last year, as they largely sat back and did little while Trump and his cronies wreaked havoc. They underestimated the potential for destruction, both from Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” and from the president’s aggressive deployment of immigration agents and the U.S. military. At the same time, the one high-stakes fight they waged—last year’s government shutdown—ended in something close to total surrender.
You can argue that they nevertheless succeeded, given last week’s results, but how much can we credit Schumer and Jeffries for an election where everyone with a “D” next to their name outperformed expectations—in many cases simply because the president is an “R”? If anything, Schumer and Jeffries may have unintentionally created the conditions for the blue wave: Their sedate response to the start of Trump’s second term played an instrumental role in the rebirth of the #Resistance, which ultimately played an instrumental role in Tuesday’s results. Schumer’s record, moreover, was stellar but mixed. While his successes outweigh his missteps, there were missteps: His approach was almost catastrophic in Michigan and Maine, where he backed moderates (Haley Stevens and Janet Mills, respectively) who flamed out, and it looks now as if Louisiana and Florida could have been on the table with a push that never came.
The same can’t be said for the party’s base, which showed up everywhere. Those voters are now demanding change—and changing the Senate leader is the most obvious thing the party could do to satisfy that demand. Ideally, Schumer would come to this realization himself and announce that he won’t be leading his caucus in the next Congress—this would presumably be hard because it would also be tantamount to announcing his own retirement. But if that’s not the case, then it’s something that’s worth fighting over. That’s what this crop of Democratic senators was elected to do.
That’s risky, to say the least. The Democratic Party likely will not have more energy and solidarity in the next two years than it does right now, and a leadership fight would be divisive and messy. But keeping Schumer presents its own kind of risk, alienating voters energized by the possibility of pushing back against the Trump administration. The challenge right now is to prove to voters that the Democrats are actually up to the task that has been handed to them. Responding by empowering a figure who has already failed would undercut the historic wins the party made just a week ago.
