Democratic Leaders See A Path To A Senate Majority, And An Answer to Their Critics

WASHINGTON ― When Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer was fending off intense intra-party criticism after voting with Republicans to keep the government open in the spring of 2025, he appeared on ABC’s “The View” to argue the case for his continued leadership of the party.

“One of the things I am known to be very good at is how to win Senate seats,” he told the show’s hosts.

Ten months later, Schumer and his fellow senator from New York, Kirsten Gillibrand, are in an unexpectedly good position to prove his statement correct, with the party’s chances of winning the Senate seen as far higher than they were at the start of the cycle.

“We are,” Gillibrand responded bluntly when asked in an interview on Tuesday if the party would win back the Senate. “I feel optimistic because of a number of things, but mainly because we have formidable candidates running in these states.”

Alongside Gillibrand, the chair of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Schumer has recruited a quartet of candidates most everyone in the party believes can flip the four GOP-held seats Democrats need to win in 2026 to reach 51 Senate seats and control the upper chamber for the last two years of President Donald Trump’s time in office.

The fourth of those candidates, former Rep. Mary Peltola, announced Monday she would challenge GOP Sen. Dan Sullivan in Alaska. She joins Maine Gov. Janet Mills, former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown, and former North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper as the cornerstones of Senate Democrats’ midterm strategy, as laid out in a memo out Wednesday morning written by the DSCC’s executive director.

Gillibrand said the campaign committee is solely focused on winning the majority, a mantra they’ve repeated even as they’ve come under almost unprecedented internal scrutiny this cycle over their recruiting preferences and preferred campaign tactics, with regular challenges from a bloc of liberal senators arguing for a more aggressive approach to Trump.

But one Schumer ally, requesting anonymity to speak frankly, said Democratic leaders also know winning back the Senate is key to quieting their critics.

“Schumer’s rise to power was based on his electoral success,” the ally said, noting that Schumer chaired the DSCC in 2006 and 2008 as it built a 60-seat supermajority. “Holding on to power is going to require electoral success, too.”

The questions now dogging Schumer and the DSCC are, in part, about whether their time-tested strategies — which Gillibrand pointedly noted helped the party win four Senate seats in states Trump won in 2024 — still work.

“The proof is in the pudding,” Gillibrand said. “Our focus is finding the most formidable candidate who can win. There’s no other measurable that we look at.”

The four top recruits fit the committee’s long-standing, if unstated, preferences: They’re established elected officials with a track record of raising the large sums necessary to compete in races where tens of millions of dollars are spent. Social media savvy, charisma and particular ideological leanings are less important.

Many of their critics sharply disagree with the committee’s decisions to back the 78-year-old Mills over progressive Graham Platner in Maine’s Democratic primary and to choose Rep. Haley Stevens over two more charismatic options, progressive Abdul El-Sayed and state Sen. Mallory McMorrow.

“The committee has a type, and many of those people are bland and don’t pop,” said one Democratic consultant who requested anonymity to speak frankly. “We have a worse bench because of it.”

But the DSCC — much like the other campaign committees in both parties — narrowly views its job as picking the best possible candidate to win the election in front of them rather than shaping the party’s long-term ideological positioning or tactics, conversations it thinks matter far more to pundits than to voters.

So when presented with arguments like the one assembled in a memo this week by Sens. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) and Tina Smith (D-Minn.) that the party needs to adopt a more populist economic message, Gillibrand — a moderate-turned-progressive who has moved back towards the center — lays out a bread-and-butter argument about affordability any Democrat would find it difficult to argue with.

“Our party is unified around a message about affordability, about getting the costs of groceries, housing, health care, transportation, insurance down,” she said.

She also diplomatically declined to engage with Warren’s contention in a speech on Monday that the DSCC is choosing which candidates to back in part in contested primaries based in part on whether the candidates can attract money from corporations and donors who want the party to move to the center on economic issues.

Gillibrand also said there was still a chance for the Senate contests in both Texas and Iowa to become major races, though she declined to weigh in on the contested Democratic primaries happening in each state.

Republicans, of course, are scoffing at Democrats’ chances of flipping the chamber and labeling the party’s preferred recruits as “failed career politicians no longer aligned with the values of their states.”

“After four years of Democrat failure, Republican Senators are fulfilling their promise of safer communities, more money in voters’ pockets and more opportunities for working families,” said Joanna Rodriguez, the communications director for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

Even the committee’s harshest critics admit that convincing Peltola, Brown, Mills, and Cooper — all of whom could have either pursued easier races for governor or simply enjoyed retirement after successful political careers — to run is a major accomplishment.

“This is a moment for patriots, and we need to have all hands on deck, and everybody has to be fighting as hard as they can against the Trump agenda,” Gillibrand said when asked how they convinced the candidates to run for Senate. “And while various candidates might have had other plans, our hope has always been that the most formidable candidate would get into these races, so that we have the best fighters we can possibly have.”