El-Sayed Backs Van Hollen for Senate Leader as Calls to Replace Schumer Grow

Incoming freshman senator Abdul El-Sayed says that he would support progressive Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Maryland) to replace Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) as Democratic leader in the Senate, advocating for a rejection of Schumer’s stalwart centrist mode of operation after Democrats’ massive blue wave.

“I’ve been very clear. I think he’d be an amazing Senate majority leader. Of course, that’s a choice he has to make about whether or not he wants to pursue that,” said El-Sayed in an interview with CNN on Thursday. El-Sayed added that Van Hollen, who backed El-Sayed during his primary race, seems “quite interested in another goal politically,” likely referring to Van Hollen’s hints that he is running for president in 2028.

“A vote is a choice between two or more options,” El-Sayed said. “If we have another option, I’m going to look at that and say, ‘who is best placed to get us action to get money out of politics, put money in politics, pass Medicare for All?’”

Van Hollen, who has led the charge for Democrats to rethink their leadership for over a year, has demurred on running for Senate leader, suggesting several times that he is not planning to run because he’s “kicking the tires” on a 2028 presidential campaign. Still, Van Hollen is a favorite for the position among many progressives, who point to things like his stances on foreign policy and his trip to El Salvador to visit Kilmar Abrego García last year after García was deported by the Trump administration.

This week, Van Hollen was the first sitting senator to call for an open process to consider replacing Schumer — or, at least, extracting more concessions out of the centrist, vehemently pro-Israel lawmaker who has served as Democratic leader for a decade now.

“No one should be committing to anybody as the next Democratic leader without having that conversation,” said Van Hollen in an interview with Bloomberg, demanding “commitments” on a more aggressive agenda to combat President Donald Trump and deliver on economic promises.

Other candidates have yet to emerge, and some Democrats have already pledged to back Schumer in the election, which is slated for early December. However, a large portion of the incoming Democratic senator class has openly rejected Schumer as leader — including Troy Jackson of Maine, Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota, Adam Hamilton of Kansas, and Juliana Stratton of Illinois, almost all of whom flipped their seats.

At the same time, public support for Democratic leaders has cratered as they have largely declined to use their leverage in key moments to oppose Trump’s agenda. An NBC poll released earlier this week found that House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) has an approval rating of a mere 18 percent among voters; a petition shared by actor and activist Mark Ruffalo encouraging House Democrats to replace Jeffries had over 600,000 signatures as of Thursday afternoon.

Schumer’s approval is even worse than Jeffries’s, at only 13 percent.

Schumer has been speaking as though he was already democratically chosen by the caucus. “The issue is not me. I’ll be reelected as majority leader, but the issue is focusing on the American people and what they want,” he said on Wednesday after being asked how he would deal with the incoming class of senators who ran on platforms calling for new leadership.

Van Hollen has rejected this framing, and says that he wants Democrats to come together as a caucus and decide on an agenda before considering who would be best to deliver that plan.

In a call with nationwide activist group Indivisible, the organizers of the “No Kings” protests, on Thursday, Van Hollen said that the new leader must not take “baby steps” or a “finger in the wind” type of action, but something that “responds to the size of the American peoples’ cries and votes” that delivered the Democrats their decisive majority this week.

Indivisible has been a vocal advocate for new Democratic leadership for months. In the wake of the election, the group has launched a campaign opposing a “Schumer coronation,” saying that Americans have “closed the door on an entire political era” that includes Schumer in a memo sent out Thursday.

“Any Democrat who is considering business as usual, or unwilling to fight at a level that matches the public’s demand for action — is not qualified to lead the party at this moment,” the group wrote. “Who leads the party in this era must be an open question, not a coronation.”