‘There are a lot of free riders in my caucus,’ Senator Fetterman said.
C ongressional leaders have different ways of approaching their jobs when they’re in the majority, as opposed to when they’re in the minority. Few people know this better than Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R., S.D.), the upper chamber’s highest-ranking official who served as Senate minority whip for Republicans last Congress.
Right now, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) is “trying to figure out what’s the best message, communication strategy to give his team the best chance of succeeding in the next election,” Thune said in a wide-ranging interview for this month’s issue of National Review magazine. “Because obviously this last one didn’t go well for them, and it seems like they’re really struggling with that right now.”
“He’s a hard-core politico” with “great” political instincts,” Thune said. “He’ll come up with something.” Three days later, the “something” Schumer came up with was to help Thune and his Senate GOP conference advance government-funding legislation to President Donald Trump’s desk to avoid a shutdown. Broad factions of the Democratic Party are still furious about it.
Schumer’s action “invited praise from Donald Trump, so I think that’s indicative that that was not in keeping with the best interest of the American people,” progressive Representative Ayanna Pressley (D., Mass.) told National Review this week of the government-funding legislation, which all but one House Democrat voted against. “People understand that we are governing in the minority,” she said. But “people need to see us not ceding our power.”
The Democratic Party’s frustration with Schumer’s shutdown switcheroo earlier this month is unlikely to transform into a Tea Party–like effort to oust the New Yorker from leadership anytime soon, senators say. “I’m not aware of any Julius Caesar, ‘Et tu, Brute?’ kind of moments coming up,” Senator John Fetterman (D., Pa.) said of Schumer, who is not up for reelection until 2028.
And yet the shutdown infighting speaks to profound disagreements that continue to exist among Democrats over how to effectively push back against the Trump administration and repair a party brand whose popularity is in the gutter.
After Schumer originally flirted with opposing the GOP-authored government-funding bill, he then whipped enough Democratic votes to help Senate Republicans clear a filibuster — ultimately concluding that a shutdown would be a political loser for Democrats.
“His fear was that in a shutdown situation, Trump and Musk had greater leverage in terms of being able to permanently shut down more parts of the government,” said Mark Takano (D., Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee.
Fetterman agreed. Once House Republicans cleared the package with just one no GOP vote and one yes Democratic vote, it was clear that Senate Democrats had no leverage, and Republicans were practically “daring” them to shut the government down, the Pennsylvania senator said. In his view, the political calculus became a “honey trap” for Senate Democrats.
“I would just think everyone should acknowledge there are a lot of free riders in my caucus,” Fetterman told National Review in a brief interview this week. “They were glad that we didn’t shut the government down.”
“They can all claim that they voted no, but the truth is, a lot of them were afraid to shut the government down too, because right now we would be in two weeks of a shutdown,” he said, “and then we would probably be demanding: ‘We got to get it open.’”
Eager to win back working-class voters and non-white voters who have drifted right in recent elections, some Democrats have spent recent weeks message-testing different strategies in interviews and on the stump. For freshman Senator Ruben Gallego (D., Ariz.), repairing the party brand requires changing the way Democrats talk about the American dream. “Let’s help people become richer,” Gallego told the Wall Street Journal this week, adding that Democrats can sometimes “feel it’s wrong to help people be more prosperous.”
Some Democrats believe that an economic populist message is the antidote to their electoral woes. Representative Chris Deluzio (D., Pa.) is helping launch a group called the New Economic Patriots to bring an end to the “era of a spineless Democratic Party.” As fellow group member Ro Khanna (D., Calif.) put it: “We have to focus on issues that affect people’s pocketbooks, and the Democrats haven’t done this effectively for many years.”
Earlier this month, Senator Bernie Sanders (I., Vt.) and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.) traveled to Western states for their “Fighting Oligarchy” tour, where they drew thousands of grassroots liberal attendees who have spent the past few months demanding that their party do more to fight back against Trump.
As they continue to strategize how best to resist a second Trump administration that is dismantling the federal government and undoing scores of Biden-era policies at breakneck speed, they see bright spots in a recent Democratic state senate pickup in a deep-red Pennsylvania county, as well as Republican jitters ahead of next Tuesday’s special election in Florida and Wisconsin’s supreme court race.
And even though the party remains deeply divided about how to proceed in this political environment, some insist that time is on their side.
“By the hour, there’s another draconian, dangerous executive action being rolled out,” said Pressley, the progressive congresswoman from Massachusetts. “And so, there’s time to course correct.”