Chuck Schumer is watching several of his preferred Senate recruits run into trouble in Democratic primaries, even as some rivals are making opposition to him part of their own campaigns. The Democratic leader has been personally backing candidates in Maine, Iowa, Michigan and Minnesota, but the map he helped shape is not holding together the way he wanted.
That has put Schumer in a strange position: he is prepared to root for candidates who have made trashing him part of their messaging. He has told donors in private sessions about the people he wants to see win, and he personally recruited some of them, promising the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee would have plenty of resources behind them. But in four key races, the alignment he expected is not there, and the eventual nominees may still need money controlled by the party’s official campaign arm.
The stakes are clear because Democrats are trying to reclaim a Senate majority, and the DSCC says that is its only goal. In a statement, Maeve Coyle, a DSCC spokeswoman, said the committee had “one goal: to win a Senate majority,” and said it had “expanded the map and created a path to do that with all-star candidates, a winning message, and stronger campaigns that will power Democrats to victory and continue our long record of overperforming the national environment.”
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But the party’s initial blueprint is fraying. Democrats had recruited a tested governor to challenge Sen. Susan Collins in Maine, a pragmatist wonk was in the mix to replace retiring Sen. Gary Peters in Michigan, a charismatic and centrist Paralympian gold medalist was a favorite for the open Iowa seat, and a moderate lesbian stepped up to replace a fellow Democrat in Minnesota. Instead of a smooth rollout, those candidates are meeting unexpected pushback tied in part to frustrations with Schumer’s tenure as party leader that date back to 2017.
That resentment has become harder to ignore because the polling on Schumer is so poor. National surveys show roughly twice as many people in the camp that sees him as a meddling symbol of Washington’s gerontocracy as in the camp that supports him, and his dismal favorable rating has made him a more toxic figure than Trump. Some candidates in the races are even running explicitly to remove him from leadership, turning a Senate primary into a referendum on the man directing the party’s campaign operation.
Schumer’s allies say the machinery has not stopped moving despite the agitation from less-favored candidates. He and his orbit are already preparing for the general election in November, with or without his preferred picks on the ballots. For Schumer, that means the real test is no longer whether he can anoint his favorites, but whether he can still assemble a majority if the party spends the spring and summer arguing over him instead of the Senate seats he wants to win.
