Defeating Schumer and Jeffries Is a Fight That Matters

We’ve spent most of the last decade under MAGA occupation or the threat of it. Donald Trump removed any pretense that our government works as it is, or that our checks and balances are enough. So voters keep asking for fighters: people who’ll stand up for them, demand affordability and accountability, and restore democracy. The problem is, if you don’t know who you’re fighting, it’s easy to mistake opponents for friends.

That confusion is rearing its ugly head right now in the fight over who’ll lead Democrats in the House and Senate. On one hand, you have Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer: deeply unpopular, mistrusted, the face of a broken Democratic brand. On the other, you have insider logic that says they’re not to be questioned. They’re the next leadership.

In late October, before the election, we ran 30 polls in 11 states. In every one, more voters wanted someone else than wanted Jeffries as Speaker or Schumer as leader. Schumer never topped 14% of likely voters. Jeffries never topped 23%. Even among Democrats, 59% want someone other than Schumer.

Now we’re going to run another set to show that support for Jeffries and Schumer is still nearly non-existent, especially where seats flipped. The new members and the Progressive Caucus need to know their districts are behind them. These polls, these petitions, this is how we tell them we’ve got their back.

Among newly elected members like Darializa Avila Chevalier, Melat Kiros, Donovan McKinney, Claire Valdez and Chris Rabb, and progressive leaders like Maxwell Frost, Ro Khanna, AOC and Rashida Tlaib, the worry is palpable. This is the first of many fights, and the first test of whether we’ve actually sent fighters to Washington. We’re not just fighting Trump and MAGA. To keep the promises these candidates made, we’ll have to take on the Democratic establishment, corporate greed and powerful institutions. People with power and money don’t want to give it up. Unless we pull it from their death grip, we won’t get this country back on the right path.

A healthcare system that works, enough housing, modern infrastructure built at speed and scale, a foreign policy that stops participating in genocides and blowing up children’s schools: that’ll take courage, it’ll take conviction, it’ll take risk. Some people will probably lose their seats.

When I first worked for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she took that risk. She did a sit-in in the Speaker’s office. Now she’s doing whiteboards telling us why standing up to leadership isn’t reasonable. That’s not because the people in these jobs are bad. The jobs are built to be pressurized containers. They’re built for conformity: wait your turn, keep your head down, keep your mouth shut. They’re built to make you forget you represent 700,000 people back home, that you’re their voice, and that you matter.

It makes no common sense to put two deeply unpopular people in charge who won’t embrace the solutions most likely to help Americans quickly and show we have bigger, bolder ideas than Republicans. You can’t negotiate leadership into being different people. As long as they hold that power, people with bigger and better ideas will be subservient to it.

That’s why I’m excited to see people and organizers all across this country begging the people they just elected to stand up and fight for them, even against their own party’s establishment. I hope they get brave enough. We need a united party, but not one united behind people who want to time travel back to 2014 or 2015. That’s the road that led us here: Donald Trump, a strongman wannabe dictator, elected twice because people are rejecting the status quo in ways too few understand.

You might hear there aren’t enough of us, that we need to elect more progressives first. But there are nearly a hundred members in the Congressional Progressive Caucus. If even half of them said no, not this Speaker, we want someone like Ayanna Pressley, Joe Neguse or Maxine Waters, someone else, that’d be plenty to block Hakeem Jeffries. The Progressive Caucus is one of the biggest caucuses in the House. It just doesn’t act like one. It doesn’t vote like one. It doesn’t pressure like one. It doesn’t fight like one.

So when we say we need fighters, this is what we mean. This is that time.

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I know it’s exhausting. I’m finishing this email at 1:30 in the morning. Trust me, I hear you. But this is a fight that matters. And even if we don’t win it, we’re building the muscles. This exercise is worth the effort. I think it’s a fight worth having.

Help support the effort to do the polling and organizing work necessary to wage this battle. Visit A Fight Worth Having today.