Chuck Schumer Is a Terrible Democratic Leader With Terrible Judgement on Candidates
When it comes to Senate candidates, the Democratic leader rarely picks well – and both the party and the country suffer.
Remember former Senator Kyrsten Sinema of Arizona? Given how she spent most of her single term in the Senate blocking one priority after another of her own party’s policy agenda (along with Joe Manchin of West Virginia), and then left the party and washed out of politics, it may come as a surprise that she was personally recruited to run for Senate by none other than Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Indeed, Sinema is the rare politician whose behavior in office was so obnoxious that it has somewhat dented her post-office lobbying career. While she is being paid a lot by Hogan Lovells, a top-shelf lobbying firm, Arizona groups report that local Democrats hate her guts so much that if they catch a whiff of her pushing something, they automatically take the opposite side. A data center project she was pushing in Chandler, for instance, went down in a unanimous city council vote last December. It turns out it is possible to sell out to vested interests so much that it backfires on your future selling-out plans.
It’s not like Sinema was the only type of person who could possibly win in Arizona. While no Democrat but Manchin could have won in West Virginia in 2018, Arizona currently has two Democratic senators, as well as a Dem governor and attorney general. And while they are not progressive stalwarts on everything, unlike Sinema, they are certainly not voting against almost everything the party proposes.
Sinema’s performance in the Senate is reflective of the terrible judgement with respect to candidate recruitment shown by Schumer and the rest of Democratic establishment. They tend to pick candidates that are far more conservative than necessary, and rate supporting Israel out of all proportion.
Up in Maine, Graham Platner, a military veteran and political novice, is running an insurgent campaign against the incumbent Republican senator, Susan Collins. Schumer had his own ideas, and scrambled to find someone to defeat him in the primary.
Platner is, to say the least, not someone likely to be Schumer’s best friend. But he does have three qualities that are inarguably in high demand among Democratic voters at present: He is relatively young, he is a political outsider, and he has progressive economic views.
But rather than finding someone with those qualities but without Platner’s tattoo or Reddit history – think Tammy Baldwin or Chris Murphy – Schumer and the Democratic Senate Campaign Committee found someone with none of them: the incumbent governor, Janet Mills. Not only is Mills a career politician, she was handpicked by the Democratic DC leadership. Not only does she have conservative economic views, those views are half the reason Platner is running in the first place; the local unions helped stand up his candidacy because she kept vetoing pro-labor legislation, including a minimum wage increase for farmworkers. And not only is she very old, she would be, at 79, literally the oldest freshman senator ever inaugurated in American history. The chance of her dying before her term is up is something like one in three.
And the strongest possible argument for Mills’ candidacy – that she would be more likely to defeat Collins – does not appear to be true. The latest Emerson survey shows that despite a firestorm of media criticism, Platner is polling roughly four points better against Collins than Mills (as well as 27 points ahead of Mills in the primary). It would be hard to imagine a better proof of Platner’s basic argument that Washington is badly in need of fresh blood.
In Michigan, Schumer at least found someone who isn’t more than a decade past retirement age: Haley Stevens, the incumbent House member in the state’s 11th district. The problem here is that Stevens, unlike her more progressive competitors Mallory McMorrow and Abdul El-Sayed, is both a staunch Israel supporter and has received millions of dollars in support from Israel-aligned groups like AIPAC and the Democratic Majority for Israel. Just a few weeks ago she recorded a pro-Israel video for AIPAC social media pages.
Politically, that wasn’t as much of an issue back in 2022 when Stevens successfully defeated Andy Levin, a Jewish former Democratic representative who was also an Israel critic. But America is in the midst of a sea change in attitudes towards Israel. The Gallup poll on whether Americans sympathize more with Israelis or Palestinians shifted to Palestinians on net for the first time last month, and by a 10-point margin. Among Democrats, the balance shifted in 2023, and the gap is now at almost 50 percentage points.
And that is before the severe consequences of Trump’s utterly deranged war on Iran start biting in. According to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli government was an enthusiastic advocate for the war, and he finds the fact that it happened deeply satisfying.
According to Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Israel basically buffaloed the administration into attacking. While the growing antisemitic narrative that a shadowy Jewish conspiracy masterminded the whole thing is wrong – and even if it were true, it would not excuse Trump’s idiotic decision at all – Israel certainly did push hard for the attack.
This Trump-Israel Iran war might just be the most purely boneheaded foreign policy move since Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union, and it is causing an energy and supply chain shock whose consequences are going to reverberate for months, if not years. Gasoline is cresting $4; diesel is over $6 in multiple states. A shortage of fertilizer is taking hold just as the planting season in the northern hemisphere starts. A shortage of helium threatens semiconductor production, MRI machines, and dozens of other cutting-edge technologies.
This is what our sainted Israeli ally insists on doing? So that we can ruin the global economy, blow up hundreds of schoolchildren, spend tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars, and seriously degrade the American military, in service of no perceptible goal? That’s why even otherwise longstanding Israel supporters like Dan Goldman are scrambling to distance themselves from the country.
Given all that context, a firm Israel partisan is about the last person Democrats should be nominating for Senate in any state, let alone in Michigan, which has one of the largest Palestinian American communities in the country. Stevens might well finish third in the primary. If she were to win, she could end up losing a winnable seat and costing Democrats a majority.
Schumer made his choice, of course, because he is personally a fanatical Zionist and views helping Israel as one of his primary responsibilities. “My job is to keep the left pro-Israel,” he told the New York Times’ Bret Stephens last year.
In other states, Schumer has largely picked the most moderate option. But one begins to understand how he ended up picking someone back in 2018 who flushed most of President Biden’s agenda down the toilet. Schumer is just not very good at this.
Ryan Cooper is a senior editor at the American Prospect, and the author of ‘How Are You Going to Pay for That?: Smart Answers to the Dumbest Question in Politics.’
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of Zeteo.
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