Like Rodney, Chuck Schumer's Still Getting No Respect From the Left. After Tuesday He Really Should

 

Almost six months ago I wrote an article for this site in which I made it clear why I'd voted for Chuck Schumer in the past and intended to do so again in 2028. Now in the aftermath of one of the biggest midterm victories in political history there are still knives out for Schumer and Hakeem Jeffries from the far left reaches of the party.

Indeed this past week Jon Stewart demanded that Schumer resign saying in part that 'he didn't meet the moment'. "Meet the moment' is a progressive applause line that like almost everything else they say the moment you think about it makes no sense.

Chuck Schumer is not a professional athlete like Aaron Judge or Jalen Brunson, which is one of the few places where meeting the moment is something that is important. Nor is he an entertainer such as Billie Eilish or Mark Ruffalo or Stewart himself where if you shout something at an awards show or wear a button on a red carpet or get laughs on a comedy show, you can use the standard 'meeting the moment'.  Because Stewart is an entertainer, not an elected official, he has a different standard for what effectiveness is then a politician does.

I suspect given his background that he no doubt considers AOC and Zohran Mamdani the kind of elected officials who 'meet the moment'.  To be clear many of their own colleagues refer to them derisively as influencers who are there not to legislate but to create content.  Of course the President has also created his share of content in the last decade and given how The Daily Show and other political comedies work perhaps all late night really thinks electoral politics and governing really are is just creating content.

So for comparisons sake let's look at how, in the aftermath of the 2024 election, people like Schumer and Jeffries chose to handle things and how AOC and Mamdani tried to.

For Schumer and Jeffries the best way they could meet the moment was to win the midterms in two years. They, in consultation with Ken Martin at the DNC, began a long process of recruiting candidates to run in every state of the union. This involved finding candidates who didn't have the kind of left-wing buzzwords that AOC and Mamdani had used to rise to office in New York but had hurt the Democratic Party across the board for the last decade.

They took a lot of abuse for what they did from many Democrats who in the aftermath of the 2024 elections believed  in enormous numbers that Congressional Democrats should not work with Trump. This was as much election denialism as anything Trump had done in the aftermath of 2020 but for a time the Democrats grasped at it.

AOC and the Squad spent most of 2025 demonstrated, involved in activism and loud speeches on the college campuses. While this was going on throughout the year Democrats were overperforming in special election, if not winning every one of them, in local and state offices across the country. This was true even in some Congressional vacancies that Republicans had won in landslides just a few months before in Florida and Tennessee, even though they lost both.

When Mamdani won the mayoral race in 2025 many Democrats seized on the idea of socialism, democratic or otherwise being the way forward for the party. They basically ignored the victories of Abagail Spangenberger and Mikey Sherill in the governor's races in Virginia and New Jersey respectively, as well as quite a few local offices in Georgia. To the left Mamdani and Mamdani alone could meet the moment.

While this was going on Schumer went on a recruitment process looking for Democrats to run in states Democrats had struggled in during the Trump era. He got Mary Peltola to run for the Senate in Alaska and he got Sherrod Brown, who'd lost to Bernie Moreno in Ohio a year and a half earlier, to run against Jon Husted, himself a replace for the seat vacated by J.D. Vance the new Vice President.  He convinced Roy Cooper to run for the Senate in North Carolina. And as we've recently learned he found Scott Colom in Mississippi and helped encourage him to run against Cindy Hyde-Smith's whose margin in that state was small.

AOC and other progressives were trying to find left-wing candidates to run in Senate seats. Their biggest effort was Graham Platner in Maine, who they considered a 'working class progressive' and who many believed was the best choice to unseat Susan Collins. The media and the left chose to ignore all of the very real warning signs both his campaign manager and indeed that he had tattooed on his skin and when Ada Mills dropped out of the race  a month before the primary it was believed Schumer had failed to meet the moment.

While this was going on a shadow war for the Senate in Iowa took place. Left-wing candidate Zach Wahls, a progressive candidate who made it clear he was not going to vote for Chuck Schumer if elected to the Senate ran again Josh Turek who Schumer endorsed. Turek trounced Wahls in the primary by nearly 25 percent. Similarly the left had wanted Jasmine Crockett to be the Democratic nominee for the Senate in Texas but she was trounced by the more moderate James Talarico in the Democratic primary.

Then a week before the primary  in Maine a very different story. The New York Times ran an article about how multiple ex-girlfriends of Platner made very clear what a toxic personality he was. Platner's campaign  denied it and the left is rallied behind him.  The Atlantic ran a story saying Maine has a Graham Platner problem, infuriating the Democratic party. While many progressives such as Ro Khanna are reiterated their support, others such as Robert Zimmerman have said "Democrats who defend him sound like Republicans defending Donald Trump after the Access Hollywood state." Cheyenne Hunt, who'd organized against Eric Swalwell over allegations of sexual assault, rescinded her endorsement of Platner Thursday.  Brian Romick, president of Democratic Majority for Israel, made it very clear "people need to answer for this."

A senior Democratic operative said: "The calculus here is that this is a must win seat and the safer-bet candidate is the best bet when the Senate is on the line. I don't say this often but I think in this case some people owe Chuck Schumer an apology."

We all know what followed. Another report came out, Platner did have to withdraw and it was only because of the general mood that Troy Jackson prevailed. No one, as I recall, ever apologized to Schumer. Instead the left moved right on to their next hero Abdul El-Sayid in Michigan and chose to frame the battle for progressivism alive in that state between him and Haley Stevens. The left was on El-Sayed's side, Schumer was on the other. In this case the left won…barely. Despite the polls showing El-Sayid winning against Stevens by double digits, El-Sayed only one the primary by one percent.

Late in October AOC gave a million dollars to El-Sayid's campaign and publicly argued the DNC wasn't doing enough to help Angie Nixon in Florida. There is some truth to that considering the margin of victory for Ashley Moody on Tuesday but compared to the margins of candidates such as Adam Hamilton in Kansas and other of the candidates Schumer helped recruit over this period, it's very hard to argue the point.

Mamdani, it's worth noting, spent much of his political capital not helping the city of New York but promoting DSA and left-wing allies to primary incumbent New York House Democrats with candidates like Brad Lander and Darializa Aliza Chevalier much to the hostility of both the DNC and many local New York political figures such as Kathy Hochul and Letitia James who were afraid this would drag them down statewide. When these candidates won, there were cheers saying that Jeffries was next. Jeffries thought this was foolishness because he was trying to build the majority and Lander and Chevalier didn't help him.

But recruiting Cait Conley to run against Mike Lawler in the New York 17^th did. One of the swing districts in New York Lawler was vulnerable. During the final weeks of the campaign numerous PACS tried to link Conley to the Democratic Socialists like Mamdani and AOC playing on fearmongering and ignoring the fact that Conley had never accepted their endorsements. Other swing district Democrats in New York, such as Laura Gillen and Tom Suozzi, spent the campaign cycle keeping their distance from Mamdani who both had come out against when he was running for mayor.  Notably Mamdani didn't use his political power to try and take them out. I guess he didn't think it met the moment.

Much of what obsessed the Chevaliers and AOC's was what has happening in Gaza. Indeed many left-wing Democrats such as El-Sayed seemed more interested in what was happening there then pocketbook issues and while there was a war in Iran going on during their runs they barely mentioned it. By contrast Democrats in red states chose to focus on affordability and corruption and essentially left such progressive talking points as the culture wars out of their campaigns altogether.

And as we saw the results played out even more remarkably then the leadership dared hope. The Democrats needed to flipped 7  Senate seats on election night alone and are likely to flip two more when all the votes are counted. All but one of them – Maine – was not merely a state that Trump had carried all three times he'd run for President but in many cases where Democrats hadn't won a Senate seat in decades and in the case of Kansas, nearly a century.  By contrast the more progressive wing of the party was only able to hold Senate seats in Michigan and Minnesota, states that have been reliably Democrat for decades – and both by margins smaller then we are used to seeing in the 21^st century.

We're seeing even more remarkable results in the House of Representatives where as of this writing the Democrats have flipped 53 seats in districts Trump carried just two years ago.   When the smoke clears the Democrats will almost certainly have since 1974 with perhaps as many as 265 seats under our control.

The Justice Democrats and DSA wing of the party, by contrast, will only have 8 members when all is said and done. By the standards of AOC that is impressive. Jeffries and House Leadership, however, will have such a huge margin to work with that they will be able to do something that the Democrats haven't been able to do for a decade: only talk to them if you really need their help passing something and ignore them the rest of the time.

We will be analyzing the results of this Democratic landslide for years to come and trying to interpret why it happened. There are many clear reasons, most of them having to do with frustration with America today as well as the Republican party. What it is clearly not a mandate for is the kind of policies that those on the left and the Justice Democrats have been demanding America do for the last decade. Hard as they may try to contort it, there is no way to see the near complete reversal in political parties in deeply Republican states such as Iowa and Texas, as well as the victories of Hamilton and Annie Andrews in South Carolina as a mandate for the kinds of policies that AOC and Mamdani have been screaming for. All of these states did move to the left, one can't argue otherwise, but not for the reasons Stewart and their colleagues will insist. These candidates all argued for and won on the issue of centrism and moderation, which is not what the Squad has been arguing for in its rhetoric. 

So in conclusion Jon Stewart is wrong. Chuck Schumer absolutely did meet the moment. He and all the people who worked with him met it by doing the work of finding candidates who he and other Democrats believed could win in states that the left like Stewart have thought for years were filled with MAGA voters and pure deplorables. And those candidates managed to convince the people the left has been calling irredeemable for decades to vote Democrat and create the kind of Congressional majorities in both houses that might last for decades if the party does the work. Schumer might very well not know what a meme but he didn't need to because he's smart enough to know that a meme alone can't win an election or pass legislation. If Stewart really thinks it can, that's why he should concentrate on comedy and leave winning elections to the grownups.

They're doing a better job than him, it seems. Perhaps they met the moment.