Cliff’s Note:
Tuesday was a change election, won by candidates who ran around their party’s leadership. Schumer and Jeffries answered it with the same caution as before. With Stephen Miller taking over as Trump’s chief of staff Monday, Democrats need leaders built for a fight, and the caucus votes are where they can pick them.
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—Cliff
One of the things I’ve learned over the years is that my political instincts—for being someone who is just an average guy, and not a consultant—are pretty good. For example, my prediction last week about how Election Day would turn out was pretty damn spot-on. Which is why, on Wednesday morning, the day after the biggest Democratic wave most of us have ever lived through, when Chuck Schumer stood outside the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and took questions about the new senators who say they won’t vote to keep him in charge, I had to shake my head in disbelief.
“The issue is not me,” he told reporters. Then, a breath later: “I’ll be reelected as majority leader.”
Oh, god, please no, Chuck! Read the room!
That same day Peggy Flanagan, the senator-elect from Minnesota, said the opposite into a microphone: “I think it is time for new leadership.” Not only do I think she’s right—I think it’s hubris and self-interest that keep Schumer and Jeffries striving for top jobs in a caucus that has out-evolved them both.
Look at what Tuesday ended up being. Democrats flipped AT LEAST seven Senate seats and won the House by a margin far bigger than anyone expected, with at least 254 (and maybe as many as 260) House seats in the next Congress. Texas sent a Democrat to the Senate for the first time since 1988. Kansas did it for the first time in nearly a century. And Republicans failed to flip a single Democratic office anywhere in the country, not one Senate seat, not one House district, not one governor’s mansion. Y’all. Not a single blue anything flipped to red this election—not ONE.
That is a change election if ever there was one. Voters said so in every way a country can say it.
Then the two men who will run those majorities walked up to the podium and sounded exactly the way they did before anybody voted. Hakeem Jeffries called it “an American tsunami” and promised to find “bipartisan common ground with the other side of the aisle.” Schumer ignored two questions about whether he’d touch the filibuster. And Jeffries went on MS NOW to tell us that “the American people don’t want us to get even, they want us to get things done on their behalf.” I mean, we DO want you to do things like pass a minimum wage hike, and also—trust me on this—we really, really want you to get even with these evil clowns, too. Don’t make me choose!
By Friday morning, a Substack writer who posts as Ana Nomis had summed up the week better than any strategist on cable. She thanked Schumer and Jeffries for “dumping freezing water all over the first taste of hope I’ve had in a fucking DECADE.”
Same, Ana!
