Schumer and Jeffries Must Go! (with India Walton and Sam Rosenthal)
I spoke with India Walton and Sam Rosenthal of Roots Action about the growing “Schumer and Jeffries Must Go” movement, which reflects deep frustration among Democratic voters in the face of ineffective, out-of-touch leadership. Party leaders have failed to meaningfully oppose Trump, are defying public opinion on issues like war and economic inequality, and are beholden to wealthy donors and entrenched interests.
India and Sam argue that the Democratic Party is structurally resistant to change without outside pressure, but that organized grassroots movements can still push it in a more responsive and progressive direction. Ultimately, they see this campaign not just as a leadership challenge, but as a way to awaken voters to demand more from their representatives.
Roots Action Senior Strategist INDIA WALTON is a longtime community activist who emerged in 2021 as a powerful presence in the progressive movement after a stunning Democratic primary victory over a 16-year incumbent mayor of Buffalo.
Roots Action Political Director SAM ROSENTHAL is an organizer and researcher based in Washington, DC. He previously served as the political director at Our Revolution and in elected leadership with Central Brooklyn Democratic Socialists of America.
The petition: https://rootsaction.org/schumer-jeffries-step-aside
Quotes and transcript follow.
Selected Quotes
India
“Strongly worded emails and tweets won’t lower gas prices or grocery prices.”
“They don’t know what the average voter wants… because they’re not part of our political class.”
“Our political system is being manipulated by outside forces… and we have failed to address that.”
“Organized people can defeat organized money.”
Sam
“The opposition party has been largely ineffective… you’re on your own.”
“We should be a party that is anti-war… and instead we’re seeing vacillation.”
“They’ve discovered that telling people they’re wrong about struggling is not a winning message.”
“The party’s not going to change by itself.”
Richard
“Is it possible for the Democratic Party to change or is it addicted to big donor money?
Transcript (edited)
Richard Eskow: There is a movement afoot to replace both Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries in their respective positions of leadership in the Democratic Party. Hakeem Jeffries, of course, is the minority leader in the House of Representatives, and Chuck Schumer is the minority leader in the United States Senate. My next two guests are leaders of that movement — integral parts of it.
India Walton is a senior strategist with Roots Action. She became a presence in the progressive movement after her upset Democratic primary victory over a 16-year incumbent mayor in Buffalo, New York, back in 2021. She’s a longtime community activist and also a nurse — so when politics makes you sick, it’s good to have her around.
Sam Rosenthal: is political director for Roots Action. He’s an organizer and researcher based here in Washington, D.C. He was the political director at Our Revolution and was in elected leadership with the Central Brooklyn Democratic Socialists of America. Sam and India, welcome to the program.
India Walton: Thanks for having me, RJ. Good to be here.
Sam Rosenthal: Thanks.
Richard Eskow: It’s great to have you both. Let’s start with a jump ball — anyone can answer. How did the Schumer and Jeffries Must Go movement get rolling?
India Walton: I think it’s a common sentiment among Democrats that leadership isn’t doing anything. Strongly worded emails and tweets are not going to lower gas prices or grocery prices, get our TSA workers paid, or move people through those extremely long lines at airports. And when voters are told they must vote harder — must vote blue no matter who — while their interests aren’t being represented, I think that’s becoming genuinely frustrating for a lot of Democratic voters.
Richard Eskow: Sam, any thoughts?
Sam Rosenthal: Yes — I think it’s exactly what India said. Since Trump took the presidency again, the opposition party has been largely ineffective at carrying out actual opposition. This is a group that’s supposed to be the counterweight to what we’re seeing from the Trump administration — the persecution of working people and people of color, masked agents being sent into our communities to terrorize people. And instead of a strong, united opposition, what we’re seeing is real abdication from Democratic Party leadership. They’re effectively saying to people in this country: you’re on your own. Whatever resistance you can muster, you have to do it yourself.
That message is coming from some of the most powerful political actors in the country outside the Republican Party. We strongly feel there needs to be a change at the top — leaders who will actually challenge Trumpism rather than simply write strongly worded fundraising emails.
Richard Eskow: There’s a scene in a Marx Brothers movie where Groucho gets kidnapped by a vicious gangster and says, “I have a good mind to write a letter to the Times about him in the morning.” And later: “I’ll ring his doorbell and run.” That seems to be the Democratic opposition.
But when there is real opposition, I’d argue that Schumer and Jeffries have sometimes stood in the way. Neither of them endorsed Zohran Mamdani, who seemed to capture that energy in New York City — though Schumer did endorse him at the last minute, if I recall correctly, while Jeffries was more reluctant. Now in Maine you have another insurgent candidate channeling this mood — Graham Platner was on the show a couple of weeks ago — running against Janet Mills, who epitomizes the old guard. And Schumer, as I understand it, is actively pushing Mills to get into and stay in that race. So they’re not even passive — when they shift out of passive mode, they sometimes become part of the problem. Am I being unfair?
India Walton: I don’t think that’s unfair at all. They are obstructionist when it comes to progressives, and it’s tone deaf. They don’t know what the average voter wants — but that’s because they’re not part of our world. These are millionaires who have been in their jobs far too long and don’t share the concerns of everyday American voters. Do you think Chuck Schumer worries about the cost of a dozen eggs or property taxes? Those are not the worries of well-established political figures who essentially have lifetime tenure because there’s no real threat. And every time a challenge comes from the left, they’re quick to collude with — of all people — their supposed opponents, to squash any progressive candidate who might gain real power.
Richard Eskow: Now we have the war with Iran beginning, which makes all of these problems more acute and more urgently in need of attention. And it seems to me the only opposition we’re getting from Jeffries and Schumer is: “You didn’t let us co-sign the authorization before you started bombing” — essentially a procedural complaint. But, Sam, my understanding is that you began organizing to replace Schumer and Jeffries before the attack on Iran. Is that correct?
Sam Rosenthal: Yes. This has been happening since before the war with Iran started. But the dynamics around the war just underscore our critique. Over the summer, Chuck Schumer made a video where he was essentially taunting Donald Trump for not having attacked Iran yet — saying Trump was “chickening out,” a phrase they like to use against him, because Trump had hinted at military action and then backed down. So in Schumer’s view, that was a political stick he could wield against Trump — that he wasn’t starting enough wars.
Now we see there’s real momentum in the House for a War Powers Resolution. Ro Khanna has been leading that charge. But Democratic leadership is again trying to slow-walk it from coming to the floor, colluding with Republicans who don’t want a vote on it. The only reasonable conclusion is that the Democratic Party is scared of forcing individual members to go on the record about whether they support this war.
We’re seeing replays of what happened twenty years ago around the Iraq War — a party incapable of divorcing itself from the deeply held desire of some members for a regime-change war with Iran. That is not appropriate for an opposition party. Democrats should be anti-war, especially anti-illegal, unilateral war against a nation that had not attacked the United States and did not pose a direct threat. Instead, we’re seeing vacillation from leadership and cover given to members who are probably secretly very pleased that Donald Trump started this war.
Richard Eskow: They seem stuck in another era. The latest poll I saw showed 58% of voters against this war — close to two thirds. Yet it feels as if Schumer, Jeffries, and some other leading Democrats are playing off a post-Vietnam playlist: “Don’t look weak. Don’t try to stop a war.” Even though the American people want this war stopped. We could blame Schumer’s age since he grew up in that era — but Hakeem Jeffries is not from that generation. So how much of this do you think is psychology, and how much is legalized corruption — the money talking and nobody walking? Is it mentality, corruption, or both? India, what do you think? You saw it at street level in Buffalo.
India Walton: I saw it at street level in Buffalo. I saw it in St. Louis against Cori Bush. I saw it in New York City against Jamaal Bowman. Our political system is being manipulated by outside forces that we have failed to address — and AIPAC is chief among them. It could be a combination of Schumer’s age and Jeffries wanting to be part of the establishment apparatus because it works for him. But we have to tackle the problem of AIPAC essentially buying our elections and our elected officials.
Richard Eskow: Go ahead, Sam.
Sam Rosenthal: India is totally right. The question of support for this war pulls on an unresolved strand within the Democratic Party — its support for Israel, and particularly for the Netanyahu government’s leadership. The Democratic Party, despite the wishes of most of its voters, has been a fairly steadfast supporter of Israel even through its genocide in Gaza and its increasingly provocative actions across the Middle East — actions that amount to an overt attempt to pull the entire region into a potentially existential war it wants to wage against its neighbors.
The Democratic Party still cannot disentangle itself from the Israel-right-or-wrong lobby represented by AIPAC and DMFI. And in some cases — especially with Schumer — there is still a deeply held belief, as Schumer himself has said, that one of his primary goals as a senator is to continue aid to Israel no matter what. It’s a pervasive attitude among Democratic leadership that is fundamentally out of step with its base, out of step with young Jewish Americans, and increasingly alienating potential supporters. They seem incapable of stepping back from their ardent support for what’s happening in the Middle East. I think they’re content to let Trump do their dirty work for them.
Richard Eskow: Let’s move to a different dimension of what we’re up against — the domestic economy. Biden and then Kamala Harris ran in 2024 on how good the economy really was, essentially telling struggling working people: “You just haven’t read the top-line economic data. Let us send a Harvard economist to explain why you actually have it good — even though you’re sweating to pay your bills every month.” And now all of a sudden they’ve discovered “affordability.” God love them and their buzzwords. But where are they on that issue, really? You can’t get at affordability without taxing billionaires, regulating banks, and reining in runaway corporate profits. Have they said anything that will genuinely resonate with people — anything that says: this will make your life better, this will be fairer, you can get by?
India Walton: For a lot of the party stalwarts, affordability is just a word. Affordable for whom? What’s affordable to someone making $20,000 a year is not what’s affordable to someone making $20 million. And again, most of these folks are beholden to large corporate donors, so there’s no incentive to do what’s right for the people.
One thing the pandemic taught us is that the U.S. government can cancel student debt, can pause rent and secure housing for people at their most vulnerable, and can move toward universal health care — because all of those things actually happened, to varying degrees. People who lived through that don’t want to go back to working three jobs and never seeing their families just to make ends meet. It’s not a fair system. And I think we’re reaching a point where average people are beginning to see and reject the runaway wealth inequality in this country. The DSA has been saying this for years. Now it’s becoming undeniable.
Sam Rosenthal: First of all, party leadership has the left to thank for its newfound appreciation of affordability rhetoric. That was us — that was Zohran’s campaign for mayor of New York, that was the organized left’s laser focus on these issues. And there’s some recognition that telling people, ahead of the 2024 election, “If you think you’re struggling to get by, that’s a failure of your comprehension, not a reflection of your material reality” — was not a winning message.
They’ve discovered that telling people they’re wrong when they say they can’t afford to pay their heating bill does not win voters. But right now, Democratic Party leadership is more or less hoping that Trump crashes the economy — and he’s making a good run at it. While that may benefit them electorally, it means real misery for working people. A party that genuinely cares about people living paycheck to paycheck should not be hoping for economic disaster. We should be pushing the Democratic Party toward a proactive, positive vision for economic equality — a more redistributive system that says: we all work, we all create wealth, and we need to change how that wealth is allocated.
Instead, they seem to be sitting back, hoping things will be so economically disastrous by 2028 that voters will jump ship back to the Democrats. They might get it at the midterms this year, and they might get it in two years. But that’s just more business as usual.
What we want to see — if affordability is really the focus — is uniform buy-in across the Democratic Party for policies we’ve seen work in specific cases: universal childcare, reduced or free public transit fares, some meaningful regulation of grocery store prices so people can afford basic staples. The party is not seriously engaging with those issues at the leadership level. Some members are, of course — but not the people at the top. And that needs to change if Democrats are going to make a genuine counterclaim to what we’re seeing from the right.
Richard Eskow: I have a theory I want to run by you. It’s about 2024. The last figures I saw suggest that Kamala Harris and Joe Biden together spent more than $2 billion on the presidential race — and as we know, they lost. I think that money actually hurt her, because people like Tony West in her inner circle were constantly saying, “You can’t say this, you can’t say that.” They produced hundreds of internet ads and tested them, and the one that polled best was the toughest on corporations — “We’re not going to let corporations profit off your misery.” And the fundraising advisor said, “You can’t run that one.”
That, to me, exemplifies what’s going on. There was a Ryan Grim piece in The Intercept a few years ago about how freshman Democratic members of Congress were given a PowerPoint presentation that included setting aside two hours a day for fundraising — not $27-a-pop grassroots calls, but calls to wealthy donors. After a while, those become your people. It’s not just ambition; they literally become the faces you know. So: is it possible for the Democratic Party to change, or is it so addicted to big-donor money — whether from AIPAC, Wall Street, tech, or crypto — that real change is structurally impossible? How do you fight billions of dollars?
India Walton: Where are the good rich people? We’ve had so many progressive candidates who rejected corporate and real estate money. But how do we support those candidacies when they’re being outspent twenty to one? It’s a real uphill battle. But in the words of my uncle Senator Sanders: organized people can defeat organized money. We have to keep organizing and beating that drum.
And I’ll add: we can talk about how miserable people are going to be because of this economy, but what I’m seeing as a nurse is that people are going to die. They are cutting hospital staff, closing hospitals — we are not able to deliver the care we should because of cuts to Medicaid. And with what we’re seeing with ICE in our airports and our TSA agents — 13% of them called out of work last week — these are dire times. Not to be alarmist, but there should be a lot more urgency around building the community supports that will keep people afloat and alive while we weather this storm. Because it’s not going away anytime soon.
Richard Eskow: Sam, your thoughts?
Sam Rosenthal: India’s right — we’re in an incredibly dire time. On the question of whether party realignment is possible, the honest answer is: this is kind of where we come in. Where activists, organizers, and people agitating for change come in. The party is not going to change on its own for all the reasons you outlined, RJ. If you go to the Hill when members aren’t on call time with wealthy donors, what they’re doing is sitting in their offices waiting for lobbyists to come in. That’s it — call time and visits from well-financed lobbies whose interests are not aligned with working people.
We have to apply pressure from the outside and from the inside when we can. The Democratic Party is not an institution inherently worth preserving or enshrining — it’s a tool that is more likely to listen to our side than the Republican Party right now. We’re stuck with an entrenched two-party system, and given all the urgent issues India just highlighted, it’s incumbent on us to act as quickly and effectively as we can. I don’t love the party, and I don’t think it has any interest in reforming on its own — but I still think it’s one of the most advantageous vehicles we have to work through if we want to see real change.
Progress can feel incredibly slow, or even like it’s moving backward. But breakthroughs are possible — through mass movements, through organizing. We just have to keep at it. And sometimes keeping at it feels really, really foolish.
Richard Eskow: When people go to work within the Democratic Party for progressive causes, I always think of the biblical phrase: be in the world but not of it. Be in the party, but don’t join the hive mind. That said, let’s circle back to Schumer and Jeffries and the drive to remove them — which I wholeheartedly support. What do you think would actually happen? Democratic politicians are generally wary of going up against their leaders, because leaders can punish them — through campaign money, blocking bills from the floor, committee assignments. So first, how realistic is it that we can remove Schumer and Jeffries? And second, who might ideally replace them, or who might we realistically expect to step in?
Sam Rosenthal: Go ahead, India.
India Walton: I’m not a betting woman, so I don’t like to speculate — partly because a lot of what’s happened politically, particularly within the Democratic Party, has shocked me. I think it’s more likely we’ll see Chuck Schumer retire than see the full delegation demand he step aside en masse. We’re probably going to be stuck with Hakeem Jeffries for a while. There may be room to nudge him left on some issues, but not dramatically. He still has broad support among Democratic leadership.
Richard Eskow: Sam, your thoughts?
Sam Rosenthal: India’s right that Schumer is the more vulnerable of the two. There’s actually real movement there — Juliana Stratton, who won the primary in Illinois and is the presumptive next senator from that state, has said she would not support Schumer as leader. There’s discontent from the more progressive parts of the party and a broad sense that someone younger would be better in that role. Whether it’s via retirement or something more public and contentious, I do think he’ll be out sooner rather than later. He’s not reading the room in the party correctly anymore.
Jeffries is a more flexible figure. I think he can be pushed and pulled. He’s most interested in staying in power, and if staying in power means moving left on certain issues — supporting a ceasefire and ending arms shipments to Israel, backing a higher federal minimum wage, whatever it is — he’s potentially amenable to that kind of pressure. I don’t think he’s a friend of the left, but I think he’s more of an opportunist than an ideologue, and that might actually be the way to square the circle for progressives like us who are earnestly hoping to move the party left — to push back against Trumpism — rather than seeing it drift toward a kinder, gentler version of the Republican Party circa the 1990s.
Richard Eskow: So one purpose of the Schumer and Jeffries campaign, I’d infer from your answers, is to send a message to the party — regardless of the fate of either of them — that we are not happy with how this party is being led. Is that a fair first read?
India Walton: I would argue the message is not primarily for Democratic leadership. It’s for voters. This is an invitation to interrogate what our representatives are actually doing for us. Democratic leadership doesn’t listen to us anyway — they don’t much care what we say. But voters do. The more these conversations happen in public, the more it sends a signal to the people who are resistant to change. Who we’re really talking to are voters, activists, and organizers — people who genuinely believe things can and should change — and we’re using that as a strategy to push back against those who resist it.
Sam Rosenthal: Right — as India says, you don’t need to send a message to leadership. They already know where they stand. It’s about standing up and saying to people: you can have better than this. You don’t have to sit in dread watching what the Trump administration is doing and feeling there’s nothing you can do. You can demand better leadership. You can try to affect that. You can push for more responsive representation.
I think people have become somewhat resigned to the idea that real change isn’t possible — that you can’t have a genuine opposition party that actually opposes things, rather than one that meekly goes along with whichever way the Trump wind is blowing. A big part of this campaign is to encourage people to demand more from their political representation, and to understand that they can get it — they just have to push.
Richard Eskow: So if people want to support this action, where can they go? What can they do?
India Walton: They should definitely follow us on social media and visit rootsaction.org. Sign up for our mailing list so you’ll be informed as the campaign unfolds — and help fund it if you can. If you’ve got five or seven dollars to spare, we put that money directly into our organizing efforts.
Richard Eskow: Last question: should progressives feel discouraged, stressed, energized, ready for good things to come — or just wait and see?
India Walton: I’m encouraging people to take good care of themselves and each other. Get into mutual aid groups in your community. Nap. Stay hydrated. Because a lot of this is going to be a matter of outlasting them.
Richard Eskow: Which in my case is particularly important. Sam?
Sam Rosenthal: I think in some ways our message is winning. People are incredibly receptive to the idea that we can have a different politics — that we can do something about the affordability crisis, that we can work to end our forever wars. We just have to keep going. We have to apply the pressure. That’s why the napping and hydrating matter: this is a marathon, not a sprint. I encourage folks to join us for it. There are many different ways to contribute, and I hope people can carve out some time from their very stressful days for organizing. It feels better when you do.
Richard Eskow: It really does. Humans are social creatures — get those mirror neurons firing through real interaction with other people. And people can go to rootsaction.org to find out more. Sam Rosenthal and India Walton of Roots Action, as always, thanks for all your great work, and thanks for coming on the program.
India Walton: Thanks a bunch.
Sam Rosenthal: Thanks.