Who Should Replace Schumer and Jeffries?

Expanding on my recent conclusion about the Democratic Party's leadership

Earlier this month, I laid out my first race ratings for the 2026 midterm elections. You can read the full piece here, but the upshot is pretty simple. Despite Donald Trump’s historic early unpopularity, Democrats may not be poised for the kind of midterm wave that they saw during his first term in 2018. Over the past year, they have committed the same major mistake that the GOP made in 2022: refusing to break from a highly unpopular ex-president and his legacy of failure. And nowhere is this inaction more salient than in the party’s decision to retain Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries, its two Biden-era Congressional leaders.

Neither man has an argument as to why they should remain in power. Both are unpopular nationally and have been for as long as they have been national figures. Under their leadership, the party’s reputation has remained firmly stuck in the Biden era, with worse ratings than the GOP even on issues where public confidence in Trump has completely collapsed. With Senate control dependent on the results in double-digit Trump states and the bar for a simple House majority rising higher by the day, keeping either one on as leader would be an indulgence that the party cannot afford. If the upcoming election is even a fraction as important as the party says it is, both must go.

But who should replace them? Quite unlike the leadership replacement question Democrats faced last year, the answer isn’t very simple. Unlike Biden, the problem at hand isn’t one individual’s or even one administration’s own unpopularity. The party at large has a thoroughly shot brand, and it will need to fix it on very short notice. To find a solution, they will need to consider some very big swings—ones that could entail completely reimagining what the job of a Congressional leader is.

The Senate

Contender #1: Chris Murphy

The key to understanding Senator Chris Murphy is recognizing that he is currently in the midst of a severe midlife crisis. After he was first elected to the Senate in 2012, he fit a very typical profile as a safe-seat blue state liberal, with a special focus on issues like gun control. Not only did he back Hillary Clinton very strongly and very early on in 2016, but he was even considered by her campaign as a potential VP. Nothing about him was ideologically novel or interesting, which made complete sense given that he represented Connecticut.

A few years ago, however, Murphy decided that he needed to be something more than an anonymous mainline coastal liberal. Seemingly unsatisfied with just remaining in the Senate in perpetuity, he took it upon himself to find nothing less than the Final Solution to American Politics. Half a decade after everyone else, he quickly found his answer: that America’s social fabric had been shredded by decades of unfettered Third Way neoliberalism. It’s a drum that he’s only beaten harder since the 2024 election, when he made waves by calling for—all together now—big-tent economic populism and moderation on cultural issues.

Then he separated from his wife, started listening to Red Scare, and began dating a progressive media executive 12 years his junior.

At a personal level, I wish Murphy the best in his endeavor to find the emotional stability he so clearly lacks right now, even if restating the thesis of Bowling Alone to every late night host in America is an undeniably strange way to do it. As for national politics, his new stances would be a clear on-paper break from the politics represented by Chuck Schumer, who infamously promised that his party would more than make up Trump’s gains with working class voters by winning over moderate Republicans in the suburbs. But while this would be a definite improvement over the status quo, I’m very skeptical that it would be as revolutionary as Murphy might want it to sound.

By now, we’ve already seen what it looks like for a former establishment figure to declare that Trump made them see the light and adopt an academic anti-neoliberal populism in response. It was called the Biden administration, and voters never recognized it as the big break it was supposed to be. Much of that was due to the issue of Biden’s age, which Murphy obviously won’t have, but an important part of it was his lack of credibility, which Murphy shares. While he isn’t an ex-NAFTA supporter like Biden, Murphy is still very far from a Sanders-esque lifelong populist. His past record as a party-line social liberal will make him very easy to code as just another disingenuous blue state elitist putting on a new costume. Given his background, it would be hard to say that voters would be all that wrong if they came to that conclusion.

While the Connecticut Senator’s willingness to learn from his party’s mistakes is admirable, the simple fact is that he is a follower, not a leader. He didn’t adopt any of his “smart” stances before they had already become conventional wisdom among pundits, and it shows. In order for Democrats to succeed, they will need someone with the instincts to find popular and impactful stances before the rest of the world already knows that they’re popular and impactful. They will need someone who has proven themselves capable of creating the new issues of tomorrow instead of just fighting the last war. And fortunately for them, they have someone who fits this exact bill.

Contender #2: Chris Van Hollen