Chuck Schumer's Desperate Denial Tour Day 2, With Stacey Abrams And Possibly The Magna Carta

This isn’t going well.

Chuck Schumer is facing increasing pressure to either resign as Senate Minority Leader or fundamentally become another person, one who’s less of a chump. Neither option seems likely, as Schumer’s defense of his lackluster performance spirals further into the delusional.

Last night, during an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Schumer claimed that Democrats are “hammering” Trump with a strategy that totally “worked in 2017.” Why, it was so effective Trump is back in the White House and more dangerous than ever! It’s like if I poke a bear with a stick, and he takes the stick and plays with it for a minute or so before mauling me. The stick was not a strategy.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro at The New York Times asked Schumer directly, “So are you the right person to lead the party at this moment?” and he responded, “Look, let me put it this way: I know how to win seats back in the Senate, which I’ve proven.” This doesn’t make sense. First place, there is already a separate organization whose sole purpose is electing Democrats to the Senate — the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, which Kirsten Gillibrand currently heads. People are calling for Schumer’s removal because they think he’s doing a terrible job leading the Senate opposition against Trump.

Also, Schumer vastly overstates his success at winning seats in the Senate. He did chair the DSCC from 2005 to 2009, during which Democrats gained 14 seats in the 2006 and 2008 elections. However, 2006 was an overall disastrous year for Republicans, as George W. Bush’s popularity had plummeted after Iraq and Katrina. The financial crisis combined with Barack Obama’s inspirational campaign in 2008 delivered even more wins for Democrats, expanding the map to include North Carolina, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Colorado, Virginia.

Even with the best conditions on the ground, Democratic wins weren’t assured, and Schumer deserves some credit for his fundraising efforts. However, that was almost 20 years ago. The Janet Jackson Principle is especially relevant in politics: “What have you done for me lately?” (Watch below.)

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Democrats’ position in the Senate has steadily deteriorated since their Obama-influenced peak. They lost six seats in 2010, regaining just two in 2012 before losing a devastating nine seats in 2014. This might explain why Schumer prefers a passive “wait for Trump to screw up” strategy. The sitting president’s success directly impacts Senate elections, and Schumer has proven a master at riding coattails or just staying out of the way while the opposition walks into rakes. This is less effective when Trump’s “screw ups” could get us in a ground war with Canada and he might have dissolved the Senate Palpatine-style by the next election.

Chuck Schumer Is Not Our Right-Hand Man

Now, about those Georgia Senate seats …

Chuck Schumer never once mentioned Stacey Abrams during his New York Times interview, but he does take credit for her work. He said, “Two, three, four years ago they said, ‘You’ll never get back the Senate.’ We won the two seats in Georgia, everybody’s surprised.”

“We” is a pretty generic description of the volunteers and staff at Fair Fight and New Georgia Project, both of which Abrams founded. They registered more than 200,000 new voters leading up to the 2018 election, when Abrams first ran for governor. She fell short, but undaunted, they’d registered more than 800,000 new voters by 2020. In 2019, she sent The Abrams Playbook to Democratic strategists, declaring that “Georgia will be the premier battleground state in the country” and “any[thing] less than a full investment in Georgia would amount to strategic malpractice.”

Abrams believed in a blue Georgia, and the people who helped her deliver it were predominately Black female elected officials, voting rights advocates, and community organizers. The Democratic Party establishment had once dismissed Abrams’s strategy as “just crazy,” so when Schumer assumes more than a passive role in her achievements, I’m reminded of the scene in Severance when Harmony Cobel reveals that creepy Lumon CEO Jame Eagan took credit for the revolutionary procedure she created: “MINE! My designs!” It’s no wonder this moment resonated with so many women. (Watch below.)

Schumer claimed, “One of the talents that I have, and I miss some and have some, is how to get the right candidates, get the right campaigns and win.”

He did suggest that Abrams run for the Senate in 2020, but Abrams backed Raphael Warnock instead. (I also think Warnock was far more likely to beat Republican incumbent Sen. Kelly Loeffler than Abrams.)

Aside from Georgia, though, the 2020 Senate map overall looked encouraging for Democrats. FiveThirtyEight’s final election forecast gave Democrats a three-in-four chance of flipping the chamber. Although Democrats won in Arizona and Colorado, they lost almost every other “tossup” race, including Iowa, Montana, North Carolina, and Maine. Democrats raised a record amount of money for losing Senate candidates in South Carolina and Kentucky.

Schumer told donors that Democrats lost the North Carolina Senate race because Cal Cunningham “couldn’t keep his zipper up,” a reference to his mundane yet still embarrassing sexting scandal. But Schumer picked Cunningham over state Sen. Erica D. Smith, a Black woman whose zipper was in the right place.

Schumer also claimed that Democrats failed to flip the Maine Senate seat because Susan Collins was able to strategically vote against Amy Coney Barrett’s drive-through Supreme Court confirmation and bolster her moderate bonafides. If that were true, it speaks to Schumer’s total incompetence at countering obvious, bad-faith narratives.

Oh, we shouldn’t forget that Schumer recruited Kyrsten Sinema, who said during her 2018 campaign that she considered Joe Manchin her model senator and that she wouldn’t back Schumer for majority leader if Democrats regained control of the Senate that year. I question his ability to “get the right candidates, get the right campaigns, and win.” Yes, Sinema did actually flip the Arizona Senate seat (during a blue wave election), but she swiftly tanked her approval through her toxic policy positions. Yet, even when Stevie Wonder could see that Sinema couldn’t win re-election, Schumer refused to say whether he’d back her or an actual Democrat in 2024. “It’s much too early to make a decision,” he told reporters in January 2023, months after Sinema had bailed on the Democratic Party and registered as an independent. He didn’t even need to make the decision, just recognize that Sinema had already made it for him.

Democrats defied the odds and expanded their majority in 2022, but critics argue that Schumer fumbled an opportunity to unseat the unpopular Ron Johnson in Wisconsin. Mandela Barnes was also not necessarily an example of Schumer elevating the “right candidates” who run the “right campaigns.”

Of course, Democrats could’ve run the table and held on to the Senate, but it wouldn’t matter if leadership is incapable of standing up to Trump. Schumer told CBS the other day that he’d caved on the continuing resolution because Republicans told him — presumably during spin class — that “you’ll be in the shutdown for six to nine months until we totally destroy the federal government.” If the bad guys claim they have a winning hand, apparently there’s no choice but to fold without calling their bluff. Schumer is playing political poker, and Republicans keep leaving with his pants.

When Harry Reid retired in 2016, Schumer probably assumed that he would serve as Senate Majority Leader under President Hillary Clinton, and he’d help her and Speaker Nancy Pelosi pass constructive legislation. He never imagined that Trump would win and his Republican gym buddies would submit fully to MAGA, but lack of imagination has always been his problem. He’s the one who boasted in 2016 that “For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia. And you can repeat that in Ohio and Illinois and Wisconsin.” He lacked the imagination to see his party losing even more ground with blue-collar voters. Now he can’t imagine that Democrats could control the narrative around a shutdown. That’s pretty damning of Democratic messaging, considering how Republicans spun a narrative around Trump’s daylight coup attempt.

The 2016 election changed everything but the Democratic leadership. Schumer is not who you’d pick to lead the opposition against a growing fascist movement. He was just next in line. He’s 75 this year, but he’s still desperately clinging to leadership when he could simply enjoy the rest of his life. This is the ultimate scene from a gerontocracy. Let’s hope democracy can survive it.