Chuck Schumer had a brutal 2025. Mockery for awkward chanting, ridiculed for the shutdown (and non-shutdown) strategies, haunted by an AOC primary challenge.
But if this morning is any indication, 2026 will be much better. The second Monday of the year brought dueling announcements: Mary Peltola for Senate (Alaska) and Elizabeth Warren for Attention (DC).
Stuck
Will 2026 be the year Elizabeth Warren understands swing voters?
Last night, Axios reported Warren seeks to put her progressive stamp on Dems’ 2028 makeover “after largely lying low over the last year” and spending “time considering what a ‘big tent’ means for the Democratic Party.”
Last year certainly was a quiet one for Warren after a decade appealing to the liberal intelligentsia (and few others):
2024 cycle: spent defending Joe Biden’s re-election when 75% of voters said he was too old and urging Democrats to ignore immigration (voters’ biggest priority and a clear mandate), joining just four other Senators in voting against the bipartisan immigration bill.
2022 cycle: spent backing Democratic primary challengers, including one who beat an incumbent and subsequently lost a Biden district while Democrats narrowly lost the House.
2020 cycle: presidential campaign pushed the party left with more than 1,000 paid staffers and unpopular positions on major issues from immigration (decriminalizing the border; free healthcare for illegal immigrants) to healthcare (banning private health insurance). Her campaign sputtered to 7% in South Carolina and was mercifully ended by just 21% support in her home state.
2018 cycle: got fewer votes than the Republican governor of Massachusetts on the same ballot.
The political press was ready for Warren’s return, with a burst of headlines:
CNN was at the ready with a headline with the perfectly annoying catchphrase: “Elizabeth Warren says Democrats need to ‘read the room’”.
NBC and others stuck with the tent theme, with a piece titled “Sen. Elizabeth Warren lays out vision for a ‘big tent’ Democratic Party”
The New York Times “With Democrats at a Crossroads, Elizabeth Warren Urges a Left Turn”
The rest of the country didn’t seem to care. As of mid-afternoon, the number YouTube views for the speech had barely surpassed the number of paid staff on her presidential campaign.1 Dozens may have even been outside DC.
This morning’s speech was heavy on critiques of Abundance, billionaires, Chuck Schumer, and those practicing big tent politics (“according to some self-described experts, Democrats lost power because we were too progressive.”2)
Warren leaned heavily on the phrase “big tent” (tent was mentioned nine times) and set up some buzzwordy false choices.3
But she was light on any specifics. As Armand Domalewski noted, Warren - sponsor of a major Abundance bill - “does not name a single abundance policy she disagrees with, just this vague guilt by association because a rich guy she doesn’t like happens to like abundance.”
Warren used to always have “a plan for that,”4 but she’ll be 81 years old when sworn into her next term and the relative unpopularity and underwhelming electoral performance we’ve seen in Massachusetts is now understood by most Democrats.
Big-money book deals5, a lucrative email list, and a willingness to attack other Democrats should keep Warren in the limelight when she seeks attention.
But her political career is stuck.
Chuck
Schumer’s decade as leader has seen a shocking decline in electoral competitiveness. When he took over in November 2016, Democrats had Senators representing Montana, North Dakota, Ohio, West Virginia, Missouri, Indiana, and Florida. The prior session, Democrats represented Iowa, North Carolina, Arkansas, Alaska, Louisiana, and South Dakota.
Those are 13 states Democrats no longer represent, most of which Democrats do not even seriously contest now. That’s a lot of states!
Democrats currently hold both Senate seats from 22 states, plus Tammy Baldwin, Angus King, and John Fetterman.
Schumer has been listening too much to blue-state underperformers like Warren, and the only path out is candidates who sharply break with her path for the party.
Mary
Yesterday, we wrote about how Democrats need to get out of The Helplessness Doom Loop and get “more candidates like Mary Peltola,” who in 2022 won a state that Trump had won by 20%.
Today, Schumer’s DSCC had their best tweet in years:
Elizabeth Warren’s style of politics is from an age of Twitter rage and faculty smugness that expired years ago.
We need big, structural reform to construct a tent that can welcome in a majority. That won’t come from current leadership. Don’t expect to hear Chuck Schumer talk about how an NRA-endorsed, Willow Pipeline-supporting Blue Dog won a red state. Much less reorient the Democratic Caucus to welcome more like her.
But together we can be that change.
So go to MaryPeltola.com and help make her the first-ever Native American or Alaska Native woman to serve in the United States Senate.
The image of Warren shows a departure from her heyday - she used to have the best team in the business, an army of Harvard-educated Don Drapers ensuring that the brand was on point, even when the product was lacking. But now her big speech livestream centers on a teleprompter, off-center from the backdrop.
We’ll try not to take offense at this, but … self-described “voters” also said Democrats were too progressive!
As Third Way’s Jim Kessler noted, “if there’s a Democrat opposed to substantial tax hikes on the rich, I have not met that person.”
“That” being everything except how to pay for her healthcare plan
“The day job Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) has doesn’t pay nearly as well as her side gig of writing books. Warren has made over $4.6 million from book advances and royalties on her 14 publications since assuming office in 2013 … Warren is the most-published current member of Congress, publishing twice as many books as the second most-published members” - Legistorm