In a scene from season four of “The Wire,” the newly elected mayor of Baltimore, Tommy Carcetti, asks an older former mayor for advice about the job. “Why didn’t you run again after the first term?” Carcetti asked. His predecessor replied that the job mostly involves “sitting, eating s— all day long.”
That scene immediately came to mind when real-life Marylander Chris Van Hollen announced Thursday that he will challenge Sen. Chuck Schumer for Senate majority leader. But while Van Hollen’s challenge will excite the many Democrats who have called for new leadership, Van Hollen may find himself dining on the proverbial feces. Why? Because the role of Senate caucus leader is a thankless job that naturally makes the person holding the position unpopular.
Simply defeating Schumer doesn’t mean Van Hollen would lead the caucus toward a more adversarial posture.
To examine why, look no further than Schumer’s longtime GOP counterpart as caucus leader, Sen. Mitch McConnell. No Republican leader has done more to advance the conservative movement than McConnell. He oversaw filling the Supreme Court and lower jurisdictions with conservative ideologues, obstructing Barack Obama at every turn and passing Donald Trump’s first-term agenda.
But McConnell was consistently reviled. Schumer may be on shaky ground with Democratic voters. An Economist/YouGov poll conducted after the midterms found 44% of Democrats viewed Schumer unfavorably, versus 41% favorably. But he’s downright beloved compared to McConnell. By the time the Kentucky senator announced his exit from GOP leadership, an AP-NORC survey found only 28% of Republicans had a favorable opinion of him.
The same can be said for Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader during the first six years of Obama’s presidency. In a 2013 Gallup survey, just 47% of Democrats approved of Reid. Progressives balked at his inability to pass progressive legislation.
In McConnell’s case, this was partially because even when he had a 54-seat majority under the last two years of Obama’s presidency, he could not ram through every Republican priority. It didn’t matter that he often had to deal with a Democratic president and he needed to rely on his relationship with Joe Biden to get anything done. Likewise, it didn’t matter that Reid had to find a consensus that included the most conservative Democrats in his caucus; voters saw them as ineffective, feckless and overly partisan — and therefore unpopular.
Only in hindsight was Reid considered a legislative tactician who passed the Affordable Care Act, and McConnell’s image as the Grim Reaper took off only during Trump’s first presidency (and even then, conservatives loathed him).
Van Hollen, it must be said, has experience that other would-be challengers lack. He beat a Republican congresswoman in 2002. He ran the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee during a great cycle in 2008 and one bad one in 2010. He sparred with Paul Ryan as the senior Democrat on the House Budget Committee. After winning election to the Senate in 2016, he chaired the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee during the 2018 election cycle.
The most important trait for any leader is the ability to count dollars and votes.
More recently, he also earned credit from many pro-Palestine Democrats after criticizing the Biden administration’s role in aiding and abetting Israel’s onslaught in Gaza as it declared war on Hamas. But he made the biggest splash in spring 2025 after the Trump administration illegally sent Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal resident based in Maryland, to El Salvador’s Terrorism Confinement Center, known as CECOT. While some Democrats avoided the case, Van Hollen not only spoke up in support of Abrego but also visited him at CECOT.
Those public stands will likely be off the table for Van Hollen should he defeat Schumer. As majority leader, his job would primarily be to negotiate with the Trump administration. That would mean passing government spending bills in which Democratic priorities are likely pared down, as well as the National Defense Authorization Act. And given that any piece of legislation requires 60 votes to clear a Senate filibuster, that means convincing at least four to five Republicans to write the legislation. Van Hollen says he wants to get rid of the filibuster, but Trump could still veto legislation and Republicans won’t help him override one.
It also means Van Hollen will be expected to fundraise for the Democratic caucus as a whole, which means courting megadonors and billionaire elites that Democrats have spent the last midterm election railing against.
In addition, the majority leader also serves as a heat shield for the rest of the caucus. Schumer’s approval ratings began to nosedive to their lowest point in 2025 after he announced his support for a stopgap spending bill despite the fact many Democrats opposed the bill. He also faced criticism for his support for Israel and his refusal to endorse Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City.
None of this is to criticize Van Hollen on his actual merits or say he wouldn’t be an effective majority leader. But simply defeating Schumer doesn’t mean he’ll lead the caucus toward a more adversarial posture. Rather, he will often have to find consensus between its most liberal members, its most conservative members and those who are up for re-election and who must be shielded from tough votes. The most important trait for any leader is the ability to count dollars and votes.
Van Hollen may well succeed and he might help Democrats increase their Senate majority in 2028, which would help a potential Democratic president pass legislation more easily. But easier does not equal easy. And Van Hollen may just find the job as unpleasant as his predecessors did.
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