“Perhaps it’s time for us to step aside and pass the torch to the next generation … No, never!” So said Saturday Night Live’s version of Speaker-of-the-House-In-Waiting Hakeem Jeffries, cackling with a fictional Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer.
The joke landed with the studio audience, and probably with many watching at home, because they see Jeffries and Schumer as the embodiment of Establishment Democrats who cling to power but fail to wield it successfully.
But it makes zero sense to equate Jeffries with Schumer, despite their shared Brooklyn roots. Schumer is about to turn 76, has been in Congress for 46 years, and has led Senate Democrats—as both Majority and Minority Leader—for 10 years. Jeffries is 56 years old and has been in Congress for 14 years. He has never been Speaker.
When Jeffries became House Minority Leader just four years ago, that was the pass-the-torch moment many Democrats had long been clamoring for.
Democrats had just lost control of the House, ending Nancy Pelosi’s second stint as Speaker. Already an octogenarian with her legislative legacy firmly established, she decided it was time to step aside, as did her elderly leadership team of Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and Majority Whip Jim Clyburn. Joining Jeffries in the number two and three positions were Representatives Katherine Clark and Pete Aguilar, now 63 and 47, respectively, each of whom had been in Congress about as long as Jeffries.
How would it make sense to snatch the torch away from the rising generation of leadership at the precise moment they helped lead their party to a landslide midterm victory? Jeffries is also on the cusp of becoming the first Black Speaker of the House. What sort of message would it send if Democrats denied Jeffries a historic promotion, not because he did something wrong, but because Democrats demanded a new face for the sake of having a new face?
Yet denying Jeffries the gavel is the goal of a Change.org petition—started back in September and now with over 1 million signatures—by TikToker Nicole Whitted, and promoted the day after Election Day by actor Mark Ruffalo, who has nearly 8 million X followers. (The fine print of the petition notes “Nicole Whitted is a Change Ambassador who receives compensation in connection with this petition.”) The petition effort appears to be generating a flood of calls to House offices. Still, it takes only a few hundred phone calls (in a nation of nearly 350 million people) to inundate a House office, and many of those calls likely come from people outside the district.
The petition does not list any specific reasons to oppose Jeffries, only darkly and vaguely alluding to “Jeffries’s public record, policy positions, campaign donor record and leadership” to suggest he is on the wrong side of the progressive-moderate divide. And according to The New York Times, Jeffries’ “cautious and deliberative style has led some critics in his ranks to wonder privately whether he has the temperament to lead his party at a time when many voters, especially progressives, are eager for them to act loudly and boldly with their new power.”
The perception of Jeffries as meek found its way into the Saturday Night Live sketch, when the fictional Jeffries says, “Our first order of business will be to march right up to Donald Trump, look him dead in the eye and say, ‘Hey, knock it off, Buster!” To which the fictional Schumer scolds, “Language, language.”
The writers missed that the day before, Schumer said on the Times’ daily podcast that Trump “is the most f—ing corrupt, not only president, but leader, in America we have ever had.” More important than salty language, the two leaders led a focused—not feckless—approach to Trump and the midterms over the last two years. Very little of Trump’s agenda—tariffs, Iran, the One Big Beautiful Bill—has Democratic fingerprints on it. That’s a stark contrast to where congressional Democrats were 24 years ago, when many felt politically obliged to get behind the resolution authorizing military strikes against Iraq ahead of the 2002 midterms, in which they lost Senate control and House seats—a rare faceplant for the opposition party.
Progressive activists didn’t always like how the two handled the high-wire confrontations with Trump such as last year’s government shutdown (nor did I!), but they stayed true to their strategy, and it paid off. As The Atlantic chronicled after Election Day, Jeffries and Schumer relentlessly steered Democrats to frame the election around “affordability,” folding in “corruption” as a “a cost-of-living argument—things are expensive, they began telling their ad makers, because the system is rigged.”
Many Jeffries and Schumer donors partly bankrolled those ads, and they weren’t just for moderate candidates. Two of the five biggest House candidate beneficiaries were victorious progressive populists Will Lawrence of Michigan’s 7th district and Randy Villegas of California’s 22nd district. Two of the biggest six Senate investments were in Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed and Maine’s Troy Jackson. That big-tent approach is one reason prominent progressives like Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have publicly supported electing Jeffries as Speaker, even though their policy positions don’t perfectly match.
Schumer, being older and having already led his caucus for a decade, may be nominally more vulnerable than Jeffries in a leadership challenge. The generational time-to-pass-the-torch argument at least isn’t manufactured in Schumer’s case. In turn, the slightest hint of a challenge from Senator Chris Van Hollen sparked a frenzy of activity on Monday.
But Schumer’s political achievement in the midterms is even more stunning than what Jeffries pulled off. The visionary recruitments of Texas’ James Talarico, Kansas’ Adam Hamilton, Mississippi’s Scott Colom, Iowa’s Josh Turek, Alaska’s Mary Peltola, Ohio’s Sherrod Brown, and North Carolina’s Roy Cooper far outweigh his ill-fated attempts in Michigan and Maine. Preferring Governor Janet Mills and Representative Haley Stevens may look in isolation like a tired strategy premised on past electoral success and political moderation; when you assess the full field, you see Schumer’s tastes, belying his age, were quite varied in experience and outlook. Jon Stewart, on his serious podcast The Weekly Show, tried to diminish Schumer’s midterm record by claiming, “Schumer fought tooth and nail against half of these f—ing people.” But that isn’t true. Most of the Senate field were his recruits, and those that weren’t, like El-Sayed and Jackson, still got his financial backing.
Of course, Schumer can’t hang around forever; his pass-the-torch moment could come in two years when he’s up for re-election. And he’s nobody’s idea of a charismatic party spokesman. But charismatic party spokesman isn’t the job of a Senate Majority Leader. Harry Reid was no one’s idea of a sparkling orator, but he often got the job done. And that job is crafting a legislative agenda that balances the disparate ideological and geographic interests of the leader’s party and country, counting the heads of caucus members, and, when necessary, wringing out enough votes from the other party to win cloture votes, so the components of that agenda land on the president’s desk. Does anyone doubt Schumer’s ability to do that for at least the next two years? Is there an argument that Van Hollen, 67, or someone else would be better at it?
Being younger or more progressive isn’t such an argument.
