Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told Republicans Thursday that it wasn’t fair to lump all Democrats in with Sen. Elizabeth Warren, and claimed that the Massachusetts Senator wasn’t in the running for leadership.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee is rolling out a slate of ads this week, highlighting the role Warren has taken in the Senate’s hearings on President Donald Trump’s Cabinet nominees. They draw attention to Democratic Senate candidates up for re-election in 2018, who seem to be following Warren’s lead when it comes to voting.
The ad slate is targeted specifically at Democrats who are up for re-election in red states and in Rust Belt states where Donald Trump beat Hillary Clinton.
And Schumer, who needs to hold many of the seats to keep the Republican Senate in check, is worried. “It’s not going to work,” he told POLITICO.
Republicans need voters to turn out in the mid-year elections in 2018 so that they can retain majorities in both the House and Senate. Right now, the board looks to stay in GOP hands, but that depends heavily on Trump’s success rate over the next 12 months.
Warren is much beloved by anti-Trump activists, who have used her speeches and tag lines as a touchstone in protests following Trump’s inauguration. Women’s Marchers have even used Mitch McConnell’s complaint, referring to Warren’s reticence to leave the floor during a filibuster (“nevertheless, she persisted”) as a rallying cry for the larger Trump “resistance.”
But Warren is also a much-hated figure for Republicans, who view her as a Bernie Sanders-like progressive figure, and a frontrunner for the 2020 Presidential nomination, challenging Donald Trump. Lumping other Democrats like Sen. Heidi Heitkamp, who have much more moderate reputations, in with Warren, smears them by association, particularly with Trump loyalists.
There are other reasons for Schumer to be worried, though. Sanders and Warren are at the forefront of a controversy over the future of the Democratic Party. Progressives, who lost faith in the DNC when it gave the 2016 nomination to Hillary Clinton, believe moving further to the left—and embracing aspects of socialism and identity politics—will help the party survive and thrive into the future.
Schumer, and more moderate Democrats, are looking to resist that directional shift.
