Democrats won back Congress after campaigning on affordability. About six in ten voters who backed Democratic House candidates said the cost of living was crucial to their vote. Now the people asking to run the House and Senate have to answer a more specific question. What are they willing to do when making life affordable means taking power away from the industries that profit from making it expensive?
Some incoming Democratic senators are already questioning whether Chuck Schumer should lead them. Adam Hamilton of Kansas said he would oppose him. Annie Andrews of South Carolina called for generational change. Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan withheld his support and said he wanted to consider other options. Schumer still appeared to have the votes, and as of November 6 nobody had formally challenged him. In the House, Hakeem Jeffries is asking Democrats to back him for Speaker. The new members have more leverage before those leadership votes than after them.
What Schumer does with leverage
In March 2025, Republicans needed Democratic votes to advance their government funding bill. Schumer helped them get those votes. He argued that a shutdown would give the Trump administration even more power to do damage. That was the judgment he made under pressure. It also meant Republicans got their bill through without having to negotiate a different one. Senate Democrats should ask what he would demand the next time Trump needs their votes.
Schumer can be considerably more emphatic about what he’ll fight for. In February, he told an audience in New York that one of his jobs was to fight for aid to Israel. In April, he voted against advancing two Bernie Sanders resolutions to block specific sales of bombs and bulldozers to Israel. Most Senate Democrats voted to advance them. So where do Schumer’s political loyalties lie when his commitment to arming the Israeli government conflicts with his own caucus’s willingness to use American leverage? That question belongs in the leadership contest.
What Jeffries will put to a vote
Jeffries co-sponsored Medicare for All in 2021. As Democratic leader, he hasn’t backed the newer legislation. After the election, when asked whether he would move the bill through committee, he called for a “family conversation.” He has been able to make a clear decision on other spending. In April 2024, he voted for the Israel security supplemental. House Democrats should ask for the same clarity on whether he’ll put Medicare for All on the agenda.
Jeffries wants to restore Medicaid funding and renew Affordable Care Act subsidies. Both would help. Medicare for All also changes who has power over a worker’s access to care. If your child needs regular treatment and your coverage depends on your job, walking away from a bad employer carries a cost your boss never has to bear. Public coverage changes what you can afford to refuse. Trump could veto a bill Congress passed. Democrats can still hold hearings, bring it to a recorded vote, and make every member answer for where they stand.
Take away the power to bury the agenda
Money is part of how the establishment keeps its power. Reuters reported that Elon Musk spent $445 million on federal races and most of the candidates he backed lost. He can spend again. Democrats who want big money out of politics should be prepared to take on the groups that help elect their own leaders, including AIPAC’s PAC, which has supported Jeffries’s campaign.
The newly elected left should organize around challengers in both chambers, make its demands public, and withhold leadership votes if those demands are refused. Ask for a timetable for Medicare for All hearings and votes, recorded votes on military aid, and a concrete campaign finance agenda. A socialist in Congress should be prepared to risk a committee assignment or the leadership’s favor to keep a promise to the people who sent them there.
If Democrats spend the next two years protecting the same arrangements that made life unaffordable, Republicans will have a chance to turn that failure into votes in 2028. Jeffries and Schumer should lose their leadership jobs. And the people who replace them should have to answer to the members and voters who put them there. The Democratic establishment has to be dismantled.
