Schumer Must Go (Sam Rosenthal, Roots Action)

Wrong person, wrong approach, wrong time.

I spoke with Sam Rosenthal of RootsAction about their campaign to replace Chuck Schumer as Senate Democratic leader. The reasons include:

• Schumer’s allegiance to a hawkish, AIPAC-friendly Israel policy that’s badly out of sync with where Democratic voters now stand (not to mention immoral),

• his tepid opposition to Trump, and

• his instinct to intervene in primaries on behalf of “compliant” establishment candidates — Janet Mills in Maine, for example, or Haley Stevens in Michigan—even when they’re demonstrably unpopular.

We closed by discussing what a post-Schumer Democratic leadership might actually need to look like—and why, on issues like Israel and health care, the party’s voters and its leadership class are no longer speaking the same language.

As Sam says here, “What bugs (Schumer and other party leaders) most about Trump is that he’s indecorous... What should be bugging them is that people in this country still can’t afford health care.”

Please give it a listen. (Transcript below.)

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Transcript (lightly edited)

Richard: At Roots Action, you folks are working pretty hard on a campaign to get Chuck Schumer out of his position as minority leader. So if you don’t mind, let’s start by having you tell us a little bit about that.

Sam: Yeah, thanks … What we’re saying is that Chuck Schumer, while he can remain a senator, should no longer be the leader of the Democratic Caucus in the Senate. And that’s because we feel Schumer is increasingly out of step with the party—certainly out of step with the base.

More and more, he’s drifted from a leadership role within the caucus to being a representative who upholds the traditional, establishment-friendly order in the Democratic Party. I think that order is starting to fall apart. We’ve seen, primary after primary this year, voters choosing candidates who represent an alternative to the traditional establishment in the party.

Schumer is unwilling to relinquish his hold on the party because he wants to continue to be a bulwark against the more progressive elements within it. So what we’re saying is that Schumer is no longer representative of where the Democratic Party is, or, according to voters, where it should be going from a political and strategic perspective, and he should let go of the reins and let someone else step into that position.

Richard: When I think about Schumer and the Democratic Party, three things come to mind where this dissonance you’re describing is most apparent, at least to me, and I’m probably overlooking some. One is opposition to Trump: whether Schumer is being forceful enough, clear enough, in that opposition. I think, for example, of his acceding to Trump’s budget deal at the start of Trump’s second term.

Second is Israel and U.S. policy toward Israel and the Israel-Palestine issue, where polls show a dramatic shift among Democratic voters—very much in contrast with where Schumer stands. And the third is the broader issue of war: opposing Trump’s attack on Iran, and how to oppose it.

So have I left out any critical issues, do you think?

Sam: I don’t think so. I think those are all right. Maybe the only thing I’d add is that we’ve seen Schumer, this year, pretty reliably backing establishment-friendly candidates, even in instances where those candidates aren’t polling well in their primaries and don’t seem to be preferred by anyone except the consultant-donor class of the party.

I think that puts him at a further remove from where the energy in the party actually is right now, which is with the grassroots—with activists who want to see more progressive candidates running for Congress. So it puts him further out of touch. And I think everything you just described can really be summed up this way: Schumer is representative of a politics, and a Democratic Party, that no longer exists.

He’s representative of the politics of days of yore. Maybe 15 or 20 years ago, this would have been the Democratic Party mainstream. But there’s a lot of evidence it isn’t anymore. Things like giving a blank check to Israel, a thirst for more war and more confrontation in the Middle East: these are deeply unpopular policies now within the Democratic Party and, increasingly, across the country, across political parties and tendencies.

Schumer, being a poster child for this type of policy, is really damaging the brand of the Democratic Party. He’s one of the most unpopular major political figures in the country, even among Democrats. He’s someone who, I think, is either unwilling or unable to go where the energy among party activists is.

Just to touch on a quick, contemporary example: the war in Iran is incredibly unpopular. This is something Donald Trump started unilaterally, under false pretenses—really, almost no pretense at all. He simply decided he was going to start bombing this country. And during a pause in the fighting—before this latest round started, when Trump was negotiating with Iran—we saw Schumer put out a video effectively taunting Donald Trump for not having gone to war with Iran sooner, for not having attacked the country with more force, more gusto.

That’s just a clear indication of how far Schumer has drifted from mainstream Democratic Party policy on this issue. It’s not popular with the base. But we see that Schumer, as an Iran hawk and an “Israel right or wrong” supporter, has clamored for military conflict with Iran for a long time. And if it were a Democratic president perpetrating this war, I think he’d be happy about it.

Richard: Well, we’ve got a lot of issues on the table now, which is good. But one thing that struck me about his response to Trump’s highly unpopular attack on Iran is that, stylistically—and not just stylistically, but in content—it has this hall-monitor tone to it. It’s less “this is morally wrong, this is tactically wrong, we’re against it” and more “you didn’t ask us permission first”—as in, we would have granted it anyway—“you didn’t follow the rules.” It’s a kind of tattletale posture.

I’m glad you brought up the old model of the Democratic Party, because it reminded me of something—this was on the House side, but—Ryan Grim, when he was at The Intercept, published a slide deck that party leadership gave to newly elected Democratic members of Congress. I can see you remember it. Among other things, it told them to expect to spend two or three hours a day fundraising on the phone with big donors.

The party is still evolving, to be clear, but the voters are way ahead of the party as an institution. The old model was: first and foremost, keep the donors satisfied. I don’t know Schumer’s personal ideology, but that means keeping AIPAC donors happy about Israel, keeping the defense industry happy with how much money gets allocated to the Defense Department, and so on.

So you have, both stylistically and substantively, this growing gulf between “the party” meaning the voters and “the party” meaning the leaders. Schumer can’t even fake it, it seems to me. There are other senators who can at least pretend they’re not in opposition to the voters on these issues, but he seems tonally and substantively completely out of step. Would you agree with that?

Sam: Absolutely. I think one of the biggest failures of Chuck Schumer’s leadership is an inability to recognize how much politics in this country has moved on from the model he’s familiar with. It’s stylistic, it has to do with policy, it has to do with his general approach to politics in this country.

There’s a wing of the Democratic Party that, since 2016, has been waiting for a return to politics as usual, and they’ve failed to recognize that there’s no return coming. There’s no going back to pre-Trump, pre-2016 — even pre-Bernie — style politics. We’re in a fundamentally different era, and it requires a different approach, with different policies.

When you look at someone like Schumer, what you see is an implicit — sometimes explicit — promise to voters that he can take them back to the politics of yore. Joe Biden was part of this trend too: some sort of return to respectability, decorum, procedure, doing things the right way. The error the establishment has made is thinking that’s what voters want — because that is what their donors want. These are people who are materially very comfortable, and what bugs them most about Trump is that he’s indecorous, that he’s crude and mean to world leaders who are supposed to be our friends.

What should be bugging them is that people in this country still can’t afford health care. People are getting priced out of their housing. People can’t provide for their families even when they’re working four, five, six jobs between two parents. Those are the policies we want to see our elected officials picking up and running with. But all Schumer offers is, “We’ll go back to doing things by the book. Elect us and you’ll get a return to a rules-based order, a more predictable cast of leaders” — where, as Joe Biden said, nothing fundamentally will change.

That’s not what people want. People want things to change fundamentally. It’s just that the way people want things to change is out of step with what Chuck Schumer and his friends in the political donor class want. So instead of resolving — or even approaching — that tension, what he’s saying is, “I can take you back to a time when you didn’t have to check the news every day.” And that’s just not what people want anymore.

Richard: Right. And we’re talking about more than recent events — a 40-year or longer history of the decline of the middle and working class. That decorous “my friend, the distinguished gentleman from New York” style of governance included the bipartisanship that was so celebrated for a while — the kind that wanted to cut Social Security, that let the minimum wage lapse, and on and on. People don’t want to go back to that kind of decorous elite rule, it seems to me.

I also have to add — and I feel a little bad saying it, because it feels unkind — Schumer is also a terrible communicator. A terrible face for the party. He communicates old politics in his posture and his style. But there were a lot of questions I wanted to put on the table. Let’s start with this one: you mentioned Schumer’s involvement in primaries around the country. Let’s start with fundamentals — why would the minority leader get so involved in primaries around the country? Why would he weigh in on who he wants as the nominee for, say, the Maine Senate race, or anywhere else?

Should that really be his job? It seems to me the primary voters in a given state are the ones who should decide that, and the party should do what it can from there. I can understand weighing in if someone’s truly alarming — but have the big-donor Democrats gotten too involved in the primary process? And if so, have they done so on behalf of big donors?

Sam: Yeah, I think they have. There’s no rule that says party leadership needs to be involved in primaries at all, and I think probably they shouldn’t be. It’s a little tough — we want to have it both ways. I’m happy when Bernie Sanders endorses people and goes on the campaign trail for them, but Bernie is representative of a social movement as well as being a senator, so that’s a slightly different scenario.

Schumer is certainly able to endorse if he wants to. I just don’t think it’s wise politics, because ultimately he’s in a unique position as leader of the Senate Democratic Caucus — he has to corral members after they’re elected. So it would behoove him, or anyone in that role, to sit on their hands during primaries and wait to see who’s elected. These are all future colleagues, people he has to work with. There’s not much advantage to putting a thumb on the scale — especially for someone like Schumer, who, by and large, doesn’t even campaign alongside the candidates he’s supporting in primaries.

Take Maine, for example — which has turned into its own train wreck. Before that, we saw him actively pushing Janet Mills, who was polling terribly. She’s another representative of the old guard — old in age and old in tenure within the party. It was clear the electorate wasn’t interested in her, and he kept pushing anyway. I think, as he eyed a potential return to the majority — or even remaining minority leader against a thin Republican majority — he was thinking about who’d be compliant, who’d be easy to whip when it’s time to get votes for more aid to Israel, or to block left-leaning legislation coming out of the House.

He’s thinking about making his own job easier by saying, in effect, “We don’t want any rabble-rousers in the Senate.” The kind of politics that someone like Graham Platner — disgraced as he now is — represents: a more populist, progressive politics. Those people are a problem for Chuck Schumer. I think his approach was to get ahead of it, so he wouldn’t have to deal with people like that once they’re in the Senate. But the net effect is that he’s been supporting candidates who are really uninspiring, and it only further toxifies the party’s brand, because the most powerful Senate Democrat is seen running around the country promoting people who frankly don’t often have a chance of winning and aren’t well positioned to represent the Democratic Party.

Richard: And he didn’t back off the Mills endorsement even after poll after poll showed she was doing very poorly. So it wasn’t just the initial choice — it was sticking with her. Which raises a slight digression, Sam — feel free to tell me I’m out of my mind, because I acknowledge I may be. But part of me thinks the Democratic Party establishment — setting aside Platner’s personal issues for a moment — would rather, given the choice between a Graham Platner type politically and Susan Collins, have Susan Collins, even if it threatens their majority. Because they’d see a Platner type as a threat to their agenda, whereas they see Susan Collins as a Republican they can work with.

Sam: Yeah, I completely agree with that. Take an example that’s still live: the Michigan Senate race, where we have Abdul El-Sayed running — a progressive backed by a lot of left groups, RootsAction included — against Haley Stevens, who’s sort of the platonic ideal of an AIPAC-backed candidate. She’s taken tons of money from AIPAC. A cycle or two ago, she ran against Andy Levin, a Jewish member of Congress from a family with a long history in Michigan and national government, who was seen as insufficiently pro-Israel. AIPAC backed Stevens instead, and she unseated Levin.

What we’re hearing now from the Democratic establishment is, “We can’t let El-Sayed win — he won’t win in a general election.” That’s their line. But when you look at the polling between Stevens and El-Sayed against Mike Rogers, the Republican in that race, it’s actually about the same — they’d both have a similarly good chance of beating Rogers. So what’s the real problem? What are Democrats actually worried about, and why are so many establishment figures putting a thumb on the scale for Stevens? It’s because they don’t want El-Sayed in Congress.

Their order of preference is: number one, Haley Stevens — that’s the best outcome. Number two, Mike Rogers gets the seat — that’s the second-best outcome for them. And the worst outcome, for them, is Abdul winning the seat. I think this is really representative of how that wing of the Democratic Party sees its job right now: keeping the lid on, keeping business as usual going. The fewer potential sources of agitation, the better, as far as they’re concerned.

Susan Collins is a well-known quantity — they know exactly how she’s voted, term after term. She’s predictable. A Platner type in that seat would have been a wild card, someone they wouldn’t know how to corral — and critically, someone not beholden to the establishment the way Janet Mills was. That person is a creature of the outside, not the establishment, and those people are hard for the party to control.

So the real fear is a surge of left candidates winning their seats, as we’ve already seen in some House primaries this year — because then the Democratic Party actually has to start telling voters what it stands for. Does it stand for a kind of Republican-lite politics — the Republican Party, minus a rude sexual predator like Trump at the head of it — or does it stand for actual progressive policy that benefits working people?

They haven’t had to answer that question for the last ten years, because all they’ve had to say is “we’re not Trump, we’re not Trump, we’re not Trump,” without ever having to say who they actually are. That’s a horizon they’d like to avoid. They’d rather run against Don Jr., against JD Vance — people heavily identified with the Trump universe — so they never have to tell voters where they actually stand: on aid to Israel, on Medicare for All, on the minimum wage. These are questions they haven’t had to speak to in a long time, and they’re hoping they don’t have to anytime soon.

Richard: And they’re between Iraq and a hard place with their model of politics — because if they side with their voters on these issues, they alienate their donors, and they don’t have an alternative model the way a Sanders or an El-Sayed does. But to close things out — you’re running a campaign, available at RootsAction.org. Are there any good contenders to be the next minority leader, or perhaps majority leader down the line? Is there anyone in the Senate — I know it’s not going to be Bernie — anyone you’re thinking of? Or is that getting ahead of ourselves?

Sam: It might be a little ahead of ourselves, in the sense that there are some Senate races this cycle and next — heading into 2028 — that could be very determinative of who’s more representative of the face of the party. But the answer I’d give is: we want to see a Democratic caucus leader, majority or minority, who’s more aligned with what the base says it wants.

Right now, for example, support for sending weapons to Israel is basically an 80-20 issue within the Democratic Party. So why would we have a Senate Democratic leader who’s on the 20 side of that split? It makes zero sense. We want someone who says, “We’re done sending weapons to Israel. We’re done with the special status we’ve conferred on that country — this is a rogue state, and we’re not going to deal with them as we would an ally anymore.” Someone who says we need to fix health care in this country with a single-payer, Medicare for All system.

Someone willing to accept that the affordability crisis — around student debt, housing, health care — is driven by profit-seeking corporate models, and that Democrats should legislate as a check against those entities, not in lockstep with them, figuring out what Aetna wants, what BlackRock wants, and then passing legislation that benefits their purposes.

It’s really a question of policy. I don’t want to get too horse-racy about it, because it becomes about personality, and it’s really not a question of personality. We want someone who’s a fighter, certainly someone who understands we’re in an urgent moment. But above all, someone in step with the base — in step with what voters in this country, especially younger voters, who’ll make up an increasingly larger share of the electorate, are saying they want. That’s the answer I’d offer right now. In a cycle or two, it might be more pointed, but that’s where I’d leave it today.

Richard: Well, thanks for this — a really great discussion. Maybe one of these days we’ll talk about Hakeem Jeffries too. But where can people go to find more information about your work on this, your group’s work on this?

Sam: Go to RootsAction.org — you’ll find our Schumer petition there, along with a lot of the other campaigns we’re working on.