Chuck Schumer’s critics are using the faceplant of one of his star recruits to argue he needs to get out of the way in other races.
After Maine Gov. Janet Mills dropped out of her state’s primary Thursday, Sen. Martin Heinrich (D-N.M.) called on the Senate minority leader and the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee to drop their involvement in remaining contested primaries across the map including Iowa and Michigan.
“I think the math and polling would indicate that that would be a good idea,” Heinrich told POLITICO in an interview.
Heinrich, who endorsed against Schumer’s favored candidates in both Maine and Michigan, said Schumer’s Maine miscalculation showed he and the DSCC have operated on an old model of electability in an anti-establishment year.
“We've gotten over-analytical as a party, and sanitized and thinking about resumes,” he said. “None of these candidates are perfect, but I think there's an expectation by voters today that if you seem perfect, you're probably hiding something.”
Asked if he had misread a race that divided his caucus, Schumer instead kept his focus on November, telling reporters in the Capitol Thursday that Democrats are “going to take back the Senate and win Maine.”
A spokesperson for Schumer, Allison Biasotti, added that “We’ve expanded the map and are running on a clear agenda to lower costs across the country — creating multiple paths to the majority.”
But Mills’ nosedive against progressive oysterman and military veteran Graham Platner in a must-win race against Republican Sen. Susan Collins marks the latest in a long line of what some of his own members and top party strategists view as critical missteps for Schumer. “It’s not like having the establishment stamp is helping their candidates win anyways — it’s having the opposite effect as we saw in Maine,” said a longtime Senate Democratic campaign strategist not involved in any of the races where Schumer and the DSCC have taken sides, granted anonymity to give a candid assessment.
Maeve Coyle, a spokesperson for the DSCC, said the Schumer-aligned group has “one goal: to win a Democratic Senate majority.”
“We’ve created a path to do that this cycle by recruiting formidable candidates, expanding the map, and disqualifying Republican opponents – the same strategies that led Senate Democrats to overperform in the last four election cycles,” she added.
Sen. Bernie Sanders — like Heinrich, part of the “fight club” of senators challenging Schumer’s midterms strategy — demurred when asked whether Schumer and the DSCC should now rethink their larger primary strategy: “That’s a longer question.”
Schumer has long relied on recruiting known figures with proven political track records for key Senate races — with mixed success. He and the DSCC spent big on Maine House Speaker Sara Gideon in 2020, and Sens. Evan Bayh of Indiana and Russ Feingold in Wisconsin in 2016, only to watch them fall short. But he’s also notched major wins in the past by landing candidates like now-Sens. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.), Raphael Warnock (D-Ga.) and Tim Kaine (D-Va.).
Schumer's strategic approach has its defenders in the caucus. "He's got a very good batting average in recruiting and electoral strategy," Sen. Brian Schatz (D-Hawaii) told POLITICO in an interview. "And I think that if you take a beat and you wait for the noise to settle you realize that nobody thought it was possible that we were going to take the Senate and now because of recruiting success we are a coin flip or even slightly better and that's due in large part to Chuck Schumer."
This cycle, Schumer scored some star recruits who have won statewide before in former Sen. Sherrod Brown in Ohio, former Gov. Roy Cooper in North Carolina and former Rep. Mary Peltola in Alaska, each of whom are raising massive amounts of cash as they charge into general elections in red states Democrats need to flip if they hope to regain control of the Senate. Schumer views his path to the majority as running through these three states and Democrats believe recruitment has helped them expand the map and increase their odds of flipping the chamber.
Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), in a recent interview with POLITICO, sidestepped if he would support Schumer for leader after November. But he predicted that “if Democrats do win this time and come back ... I think a lot of the critique of Chuck will go away, because he did a lot of the recruitment, and along with [Sen.] Kirsten [Gillibrand], has done a lot of the fundraising.”
But some establishment-backed candidates are struggling. In Michigan, Rep. Haley Stevens is mired in a tight race against a pair of more progressive rivals, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow and Abdul El-Sayed. Hours after Mills dropped out in Maine, McMorrow posted a video on X of her saying she wouldn’t back Schumer as leader with the caption: “The party establishment in DC doesn’t get to pick our next Senator.”“Let it play out,” McMorrow told POLITICO Thursday evening. “This is a moment for Democrats, and I mean Democratic voters on the ground, to decide what party we want next. It is our turn. It is not the party's turn anymore.”
In Iowa, state Sen. Zach Wahls is attempting to yoke rival state Rep. Josh Turek, who the DSCC has quietly backed in the race, to Schumer — ramping up the attack line as VoteVets, a group often aligned with the party apparatus, works to boost Turek on the airwaves.
And in Minnesota, progressive Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan is leading Rep. Angie Craig (D-Minn.) in polling — sometimes by double digits — and has been racking up big-name support, including from retiring Sen. Tina Smith (D-Minn.) and seven other senators including Heinrich. (Schumer and the DSCC haven’t publicly taken sides there).
Schumer set off a firestorm within the Democratic Party after he caved to Republicans during the first government shutdown of Trump’s second term last year, infuriating progressives within his caucus and a party base desperate for its leaders to show more spine against the administration. Schumer argued that a shutdown would empower Trump, and that Democrats would have a stronger hand later in the year as Trump’s favorability sank.
While there was never a significant threat to his leadership from within the caucus, Schumer has become a bogeyman on the campaign trail. His leadership quickly became a litmus test in Democratic Senate primaries, with several insurgent candidates outright rejecting him as caucus leader come 2028 and even some of Schumer’s own picks staying noncommittal. It’s a dynamic that other legislative leaders, namely Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid, have faced in the past but still gone on to be reelected in closed-door, secret ballot leadership contests.
But now, those anti-Schumer candidates are starting to win their primaries, potentially complicating his path to retaining power next session. Juliana Stratton, the lieutenant governor of Illinois who is poised to succeed retiring Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), Schumer’s No. 2, has long said she would not support the New York Democrat for leader. Platner, now the presumptive party nominee in Maine, launched his campaign saying he wouldn’t give Schumer his blessing. Wahls has called for Schumer to step down as leader.
Schumer has made some effort to reach out to his critics. He and McMorrow had a short but cordial meeting a few months ago, well after the DSCC had backed Stevens in the race, according to people familiar with the meeting. He called Stratton after she won the primary; the two also had an introductory meeting in Washington a couple of weeks ago, according to her campaign.
The backlash to Schumer comes as Democratic voters who’ve grown disillusioned with party leadership clamor for fighters who will take a more aggressive approach to the second Trump administration. Schumer’s critics say his picks are generally more old-school, and cautious to a fault.
It also reflects the growing alarm about Democrats’ aging standard bearers, after voters watched President Joe Biden decline in real time and a growing number of congressional lawmakers die in office. Some Democrats were particularly critical of Schumer, 75, pushing Mills, who turns 79 at the end of this year and who would have been the oldest first-term senator ever elected.
As some Democrats knife Schumer, national Republicans are salivating at the potential for left-leaning picks to emerge from their primary fields as the GOP stares down toughening terrain in their bid to hold the Senate majority.
The party’s Senate campaign arm rushed on Thursday to cast Platner as a “scandal-plagued” and “extreme” left candidate, recirculating his various controversies and attempting to tie other Democrats across the battleground map to him. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), who chairs the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said in a phone interview that he “can’t think of a more challenged, disgusting position for the Democrat Party to take than supporting Graham Platner.”
“You now have a radical becoming the face of the Democrat Party, along with El-Sayed in Michigan. You've got these folks who are just remarkably out of step even with their own party. And you go to Minnesota and you have Flanagan,” Scott said. “So there is this consistent theme of extremist radicals who are dangerous for America's future, and in their own states they're out of step with even the Democratic Party and the entire state as a whole.”
