Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) rejected calls for him to step aside as top Democrat in the Senate over his handling of a government funding bill last week.

“I should be the leader,” he said in a Tuesday interview on ABC’s “The View.” “One of the things I am known to be very good at is I know how to win Senate seats. In other words, I’m a strategist in terms of recruiting candidates, helping the candidates run campaigns, and winning.”

He compared his job leading Senate Democrats to a conductor of an orchestra who ensures the unified performance of assembled musicians.

“I have a lot of talent in that orchestra, I show them off,” he said of his colleagues. “We are totally united in one thing, we are united in going after Trump and showing the American people that he’s making the middle class pay for the tax cuts on the rich.”

Schumer is facing a barrage of intraparty criticism for refusing to block Republican legislation funding the government last week. A progressive organizing group called on him to step aside as leader over the weekend, while Democratic voters have urged their senators to embrace new leadership in Washington.

House Democrats aren’t happy with Schumer’s performance, either. During a press conference last week, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) notably dodged several questions about whether he has confidence in his fellow New York Democrat. He answered with a curt “Next question.”

Asked by reporters again on Tuesday, Jeffries, said, “Yes. Yes, I do.” He said he has spoken to Schumer about getting on the same page, particularly on fighting expected Republican cuts to health care programs like Medicaid.

“We had a good conversation about the path forward, particularly as it relates to making sure we all speak with one voice in the effort to stop these Medicaid cuts from ever being enacted into law,” Jeffries said at an event in New York City.

Democrats are desperate to turn public attention away from their disagreements and failure to get a bipartisan government funding bill and back toward Trump’s policies, including his planned $5 trillion tax cut package that is expected to include at least $1.5 trillion in cuts to government programs. Dozens of Democratic lawmakers are holding town halls across the country this week to highlight the threat of coming cuts to Medicaid.

“Make no mistake, they’re coming after you,” Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) warned at an event in Scottsdale on Monday.

Schumer, for his part, is doing damage control this week with several media appearances where he has argued that allowing the government to shut down would have been even more disastrous for federal agencies. In such a scenario, he said, Trump would have more power to shutter departments and lay off workers for good.

But he also acknowledged the shortcomings of his strategy, which essentially relied on hoping that a few House Republicans would stand up to Trump and vote against a partisan six-month funding bill. Only one did so, which didn’t prevent its passage. Senate Democrats were then faced with a difficult choice of swallowing the bill or voting for a shutdown.

“The problem was it came so fast,” he told “CBS Mornings” on Tuesday. “Hakeem and I had a strategy, which was to try and get a bipartisan bill, which meant in the House the Republicans would not have been able to pass it.”

“Only at the last minute did it happen that they all voted for it,” he added. “So we still ... tried to get that bipartisan bill on Wednesday ― that’s why I said we didn’t have the votes yet.”

Arthur Delaney contributed reporting.