It’s hard to look much of anywhere in discussions among Democrats right now without encountering a lot of hand-wringing over a party leadership vacuum, often combined with demands to purge the congressional leadership. I offered some pointed thoughts on the general topic at New York:
A key object of complaints about the Democratic Party’s performance during the second Donald Trump administration has been the Democratic congressional leadership, and particularly House and Senate minority leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer. Both men are from New York and have a vague association with the centrist wing of the party, but otherwise these men don’t necessarily have all that much in common. The House and Senate are very different institutions with wildly varying perspectives on the legislative process and divergent incentive systems. Yet we often hear their fecklessness is responsible for the unsavory reputation of the Democratic Party and the ever-simmering anger of “the base” at the alleged unwillingness of their elected officials to “fight Trump.” A recent example of the monomania over Jeffries and Schumer came from the Guardian’s Mehdi Hasan:
“If you want to understand why the Democrats are polling at their lowest point for more than three decades, look no further than these two uninspiring Democratic leaders in Congress.
“If you want to understand why 62% of Democratic voters say ‘the leadership of the Democratic party should be replaced with new people,’ again, look no further than Jeffries and Schumer.
“Week after week, month after month, they embarrass themselves, undermine their colleagues and demoralize their voters. Theirs is a record of cowardice and capitulation.”
Hasan’s biggest beef with Schumer and Jeffries seems to be that they haven’t yet endorsed Democratic mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani. To be clear, I think they should endorse him too, mostly because the alternatives to Mamdani are so incredibly bad, not because positions on municipal elections are the litmus test for national leaders. But Hasan also bashes the congressional figureheads for admitting they don’t have much power at present:
“Let’s start with Jeffries. In February, the hapless House minority leader wondered aloud: ‘I’m trying to figure out what leverage we actually have. They control the House, the Senate. And the presidency. It’s their government. What leverage do we have?’ It was a shrug of impotence; a sign of pre-emptive submission only weeks after Trump’s inauguration.”
But you know what? Jeffries was absolutely right. There is no one more “impotent” than a House minority leader, unless it’s a House minority leader at a time when maximum partisan polarization makes coalitions to thwart the Dear Leader in the White House literally impossible. Should he pretend to have power only to disappoint Democrats when he can’t actually exercise it? Indeed, doing just that earned Schumer special contempt from Hasan:
“Remember that cringe chant of ‘We will win’ and ‘We won’t rest’ that he led outside the Treasury building in February, as Elon Musk’s Doge teams rampaged through the federal government?
“Or when he shamefully backed down from a confrontation with Trump over a government shutdown in March and earned the scathing soubriquet ‘Surrender Schumer’?”
On the government-shutdown threat, Hasan has a point. Unlike Jeffries, Schumer and Senate Democrats did have one and only one bullet in the chamber: the ability to shut down the government with a filibuster against a stopgap-spending bill. But you can understand Schumer’s fear of wasting this one bullet, or using it when the prime victims would have been the same federal employees Musk and DOGE were threatening. My sense is that his biggest mistake was brandishing the pistol before putting it away. But it wasn’t going to bring Trump 2.0 to a halt in any event.
Hasan contrasts the feckless leaders with Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who toured the country making speeches about the need to resist “oligarchs.” Good for them. But that’s not a proper task for congressional leaders, who have time-consuming day jobs even if they have no power.
A far better idea than deposing Jeffries and Schumer in favor of superior communicators or tougher fighters of fights they can’t win would be for Democrats to stop looking to Congress for national leadership, at least before the next presidential cycle. Even in the best of times, members of Congress are famously unrelatable thanks to their narrow legislative perspectives, their strange parliamentary jargon and their inscrutable traditions. There’s a reason only four sitting members of Congress (James Garfield, Warren Harding, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama) have ever been elected president, with the two most recent being transcendent political talents hardly defined by their congressional service.
It’s actually unclear whether Democrats need clearly defined leaders in order to break Trump’s hold on Washington in the 2026 midterms, and they’ll have a presidential-nominating contest in 2028 to choose a national leader then. But if they do need visible leaders for the Midterms, they should look at the Democratic governors instead of anyone in their powerless ranks in Congress.
Governors are by definition chief executives, not legislators dependent on party status. They can wield executive authority with or without legislative cooperation and can’t be locked out of power like their counterparts in Congress. They have countless platforms for communicating their views, not just unwatchable maneuvers on C-Span. And many of them are very good at talking to voters across party lines. Democrats Laura Kelly of Kansas and Andy Beshear of Kentucky have twice won in deep-red states. Former North Carolina governor Roy Cooper is a red-hot Senate prospect because he’s been running for office in that relatively conservative state for over 30 years without a single defeat.
If Democrats consider politicians like Kelly, Beshear, or Cooper too moderate and insist on a fiery “fighter,” they can obviously look to such highly combative governors as Gavin Newsom of California and J.B. Pritzker of Illinois, who have battled Trump on a broad front for years and have actually achieved some victories. Nobody in Washington can outdo them for rhetorical volume and intensity, and they tend to speak in language that voters can understand.
Should Democrats flip either congressional chamber next year, then it will be appropriate to expect more of their leaders in Washington. But for now Democrats would be well advised to leave Jeffries and Schumer to their largely irrelevant tasks and look around the country for leaders, not just to governor, but to mayors, attorneys general, and civic leaders who are fighting the good fight without constantly displaying their powerlessness.
