CNN
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Democrats have long found the flip phone Chuck Schumer still insists on using as an endearing quirk that illustrates how committed he is to his way of talking to all sorts of allies, all the time.
After how he handled the spending fight, many inside and outside the Capitol are starting to see that phone as a metaphor for a leader who’s out of date and refusing to change as politics changes radically around him.
“This is not the first time that members of the caucus expressed frustration that he wasn’t as inclusive as he could have been on decision making or strategy, but the stakes of this particular vote were huge,” said one Senate Democrat, who like others, is still wary of going public with attacks on the leader.
But CNN’s conversations with three-dozen Democratic senators, members of the House, top aides and other prominent leaders detail a cratering of support, with many starting to feel that he can’t be the party’s future and shouldn’t be their present.
“If he doesn’t lose it between now and then, he won’t be leader in two years,” said another Democratic senator, who added, looking ahead to the next expected Congressional showdown, “he can’t be trusted alone to negotiate the debt limit.”
In a video he blasted out to his supporters Friday night, longtime Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders — an independent who caucuses with the Democrats — called the situation “an absolute failure of Democratic leadership.” In a video he blasted out to his own supporters, freshman California Sen. Adam Schiff called it “a bad day for our country – and for the Democratic Party.”
“Schumer tried to be too smart,” said another Democratic senator, “but he ended up looking indecisive.”
Schumer and the nine Democrats who voted with him on Friday say they were making the responsible decision between two horrible choices. Option one: advance a bill full of major cuts and leeway for Trump’s administration to reallocate billions of funds for their own purposes. Option two: enable a shutdown which could have stretched on indefinitely while Trump officials flexed executive authority over spending in ways they would find even more devastating, not to mention leaving tens of thousands of federal workers without pay and millions more without services.
But critics from across traditional Democratic divides of ideology, geography and age see a pile of excuses and false choices. They say Schumer flubbed weeks of strategy, essentially negotiating with himself for less to make the final bill worse than they could have gotten it to be with better pushback. They say he mismanaged dynamics internally with colleagues and publicly so that he ended up delivering a fresh round of dejection to a party already slumping on the ropes.
Any Democrat paying attention knew this week of negotiations was going to be terrible for them. But, many say, it was Schumer’s leadership that left them looking and feeling even worse—and with much less leverage for future fight, now that Senate Republicans saw how easy it was to write what Trump wants into the bills, make no effort to reach out to Democrats, and watch them be the ones to attack each other.
“Republicans saw Democrats were weak, and thought, ‘We’re going to call your bluff’—and they were right,” said a top aide to one Senate Democrat. “This was always going to be no-win. But it didn’t have to be this much of an ‘L’.”
As Trump got exactly the bill he wanted while losing only two Republican votes combined between the House and Senate, Schumer has lost faith among several of his Democratic senators for being able to manage the fights ahead. He left several of his own senators distrusting others in their own caucus. Several Democratic governors, who have privately been knocking Schumer as inept for weeks, finished Friday feeling more validated than they ever wanted to be.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries was not just frustrated by what played out, but annoyed that Schumer—who otherwise calls multiple times a day to check in on everything from strategy to tweets—barely talked to him about any of this over the last few weeks, according to several House Democratic sources. Always deliberate with his words, the only answer the fellow New Yorker would give on Friday when asked by CNN if he thought a change in Senate leadership was needed was, “next question.”
Outside the Capitol, many Democratic assessments of Schumer are much harsher.
“Democrats need a leader who is up to the moment both in terms of willingness to fight and ability to communicate about that willingness to fight. I don’t think at this point Senator Schumer has had either,” said Amanda Litman, the co-founder of the group Run for Something, which helps younger and newer Democratic candidates put together campaigns on the local level.
A leader of a major Democratic-aligned organization, for now reluctant to exacerbate the party fractures by speaking publicly, said Schumer has now made himself irrelevant.
“The biggest impact of this last week is that from now on, the broad spectrum of the Democratic Party, from the center to the left, will be looking to the House for leadership,” that person told CNN on Friday afternoon.
Schumer sees what he did, by contrast, as truly grappling with how different Trump is as a president now, versus when they had their showdown fights in his first term. Then, Schumer said repeatedly in conversations, Trump wasn’t looking for pretexts to fire federal government workers. Then, Schumer also said, Republican leaders in Congress were trying to avoid a shutdown, while now he saw them as egging one on in a way that he feared meant they wouldn’t have allowed government to re-open anytime soon.
“Once you shut down the government, it is totally up to DOGE and Trump and Musk how long we’re in shutdown,” Schumer said in an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN on Friday evening. “We could have been in shutdown for months, and why did Musk and Trump want to shut down? Because they wanted this power to achieve their goal of dramatically shrinking, destroying, hurting innocent people in the government.”
So Schumer’s thinking going into the week, several people familiar with it told CNN, was trying to avoid letting House Speaker Mike Johnson use him as a foil—being clearer with his position, the Senate leader thought, would make it easier to line up House Republican votes. He also felt he was giving Jeffries the maximum amount of space to unite against the bill. And he figured this Republican leadership wouldn’t make any real concessions on the bill no matter what he did.
For three days in a row leading up to the vote, Schumer held long lunch meetings for the Senate Democrats to air their grievances and opinions about what to do. To many of the senators stewing and steaming through them, this felt like not having a strategy—to the point that one senator, according to a colleague, spoke up to say that even former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, despite being constantly mutinied against by his own Republican colleagues, managed to get a meeting with then-President Joe Biden during their 2023 debt limit fight.
Schumer has told allies he saw these lunches as his strategy, trying to let colleagues coalesce around which of the bad options they felt was worse by arguing with each other, but without his twisting arms either way. He didn’t want a shutdown. He felt like Democrats would lose the political fight over one. But he says he wanted his colleagues to get there themselves.
He also called multiple senators into his office to tell them they had to convince particular colleagues to vote yes, and urged several leaders of Democratic-leaning organizations to tamp down their rhetoric pushing for a shutdown.
And when Schumer announced his own yes vote, it was not just within a day of floating an alternative strategy—he even surprised one of his closest allies, according to multiple senators: Washington Sen. Patty Murray, the ranking member on the Appropriations Committee and far from a standard resistance figure. She ended up voting no.
House Democrats were bewildered themselves by the suggestion that Schumer was doing them any favors. Several joined the nearly unanimous Democratic vote against the Republican budget bill not because they wanted a shutdown, but because they thought they were giving the Senate more leverage. Others were convinced that they needed to be part of a unified Democratic effort.
Several close to Jeffries himself, meanwhile, scoff at Schumer’s suggesting that House Democrats didn’t think Johnson would pass the bill, arguing the senator doesn’t get how much obedience to Trump has come to define Republicans in Congress. They think Schumer never understood Jeffries’s strategy was to push for the fight since he was convinced Democrats could win, and worried about the policy and political consequences of putting a rubber stamp on the Republican bill.
At a panel of union leaders at their retreat, Connecticut Rep. Rosa DeLauro asked them to call Schumer to remind him that they supported a “No” vote. Several did. Schumer told those he spoke with he still felt confident he was right.
Later in that same strategy session, another House Democrat vented more broadly: “What’s Chuck Schumer thinking?”
Another voice shouted back from the crowd, “Of himself!”
Many members started to clap and cheer, according to two people in the room.
“The relationship is broken,” one House Democratic member told CNN. “The anger is so strong right now that the future is hard to imagine.”
Schumer’s fellow New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who in 2017 stood out for voting against every one of Trump’s Cabinet nominees, by Thursday’s lunch of Senate Democrats was speaking so loudly in favor of voting Yes to advance the government funding bill that reporters outside could her through the walls.
Gillibrand is the chair of the Senate Democrats’ campaign arm for the 2026 elections. After voting yes, despite a detailed justification she argued in a press release from her office on Friday, several of her colleagues and Democratic operatives told CNN they did not see how she could credibly appeal to donors and voters who wanted more of a fight.
“We are confident we will have the resources we need to win,” an aide to the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee told CNN. “When given an explanation, donors are receptive and understand the negative consequences of a shutdown.”
Others sympathetic to Schumer and Gillibrand argued to CNN that it’s hard to believe the intricacies of a procedural vote in March 2025 will really shape the 2026 midterms, especially because by the fall Democrats are expecting Republicans to push through a bill to enact much of Trump’s agenda that includes sweeping tax cuts and deep spending reductions on programs like Medicare without requiring a single Democratic vote, which they think will unify both Democratic officials and their supporters.
But with Senate Democrats acknowledging they probably don’t have enough opportunities in races to get to the majority even in their best case scenario for 2026, they are hoping to get there by 2028. By then, Schumer would be 77, in Washington for as long as Joe Biden had been when he was elected president, and have weathered years of compromises with Trump. He’d also have had to run for a sixth term that would keep him in office until his mid-80s.
Chatter about who will be the next Senate leader was whipping around Washington long before this week—though the focus of much speculation, Hawaii Sen. Brian Schatz, ultimately joined Schumer in voting “Yes.”
And while multiple senators declined CNN’s interview requests because, they said, they wanted to be able to tell Schumer they weren’t involved in questioning his future, some of the No votes stood by him publicly.
“Schumer is a senator as well, and every one of us has to make these tough decisions,” New Mexico Sen. Ben Ray Luján said on Friday. When asked if he questioned the New Yorker’s leadership, he said, “I support Chuck Schumer.”
Republicans “own the pain that will result from this Continuing Resolution, and they will own the disastrous effects of cutting Medicaid and Social Security—which they call a Ponzi scheme. We need to be ready for the fight ahead and redouble our efforts, and be unified,” said Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal, also a No vote.
Asked if he had any concerns about Schumer’s leadership going forward, Blumenthal answered without giving a yes or no, but insisted that was only because his only focus was Friday’s vote.
Or there was Colorado Sen. John Hickenlooper’s response when asked on Friday afternoon if he had a message to those Democrats outside the Senate so outraged that they’re calling on Schumer to resign: “Oh, I don’t have a message”
CNN’s Sarah Ferris and Manu Raju contributed to this report.
