Bennet questions Schumer’s Senate leadership

Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet on Friday urged fellow Democrats to think carefully about the party’s top brass — including whether New York Sen. Chuck Schumer is the right leader for Senate Democrats.

While Bennet stopped short of calling for Schumer to step down, Bennet said the party must be “constantly” assessing party leadership and needs “to figure out where we’ve let people down.” He also encouraged Democrats to embrace “a new generation of leaders” nationally.

Bennet noted that he was the first Democrat to appear on national television after former US President Joe Biden’s disastrous June debate against Donald Trump, and that he had predicted at the time that the party would “lose in a landslide if he stayed on the ticket.”

“Turned out we basically lost in the landslide anyway,” Bennet told Semafor’s Burgess Everett at the World Economy Summit in Washington, DC. “We’re going to have to correct that. And it’s going to require us to make some uncomfortable decisions.”

The Democratic Party “has been repudiated,” he said, and must offer voters a more compelling vision for the country.

“We’ve lost to Trump twice… and the second time we lost to him, we lost after he had taken away a woman’s right to choose,” Bennet said, referring to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision rolling back Roe v. Wade’s abortion protections. “[Trump is] the first president to strip us of a fundamental civil right since Reconstruction… That begs real questions about what it is we’re presenting to the American people.”