Full List of Senators Who Back Chris Van Hollen Over Chuck Schumer

The race for Senate majority leader is heating up.Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen has emerged as the leading alternative to New York Senator Chuck Schumer in a sign of the incoming Democratic majority’s preference for change and an aversion to establishment politics.Maryland Senator Chris Van HollenVermont Senator Bernie SandersMichigan Senator-elect Abdul El-SayedMinnesota Senator-elect Peggy FlanaganOther lawmakers not supporting Schumer or who want new leadership:Illinois Senator Juliana StrattonKansas Senator Adam HamiltonMaine Senator-elect Troy JacksonNew Hampshire Senator-elect Chris PappasTexas Senator-elect James TalaricoAnother 16 senators or senators-elect have not yet committed as to whether they will support Schumer, according to an analysis published Friday by Primary Democrats. Fifteen have yet to take a public stance on the issue. Altogether, 25 Democrats have veered away from Schumer—nearly half of the at least 55 Democratic seats that will dominate the upper chamber come January.Read more about Van Hollen:Newly elected Democratic Senator Scott Colom is pushing back after Senator Chuck Schumer took credit for his win, refusing to commit to backing him for Senate majority leader next year.Colom told MS NOW’s Symone Sanders-Townsend Thursday that he spoke to Schumer after his victory the day before and “thanked him for his part in making this happen.” Colom made sure to stress that it was the people of Mississippi who chose him to be a senator, not Schumer.“He did initially understand that our party has to look south for future leadership. It’s not accurate to say he recruited me, though, because the people of Mississippi recruited me,” Colom said. “You think I was listening to somebody that lives in Brooklyn when I was deciding to run for United States Senate? No, I listened to the people of Mississippi.”In a New York Times interview last week, Schumer said he recruited Colom to take on Mississippi’s incumbent Republican, Senator Cindy-Hyde Smith. When Townsend asked Colom if he would support Schumer to lead the Senate next year, Colom wouldn’t commit.“I gotta know my options, and I’m not trying to be cute,” Colom said. He said he didn’t think it was “a good thing” that Schumer and Representative Hakeem Jeffries, who is currently in line to be the next speaker of the House, “both live in the same borough” of New York City.“I’m looking for a person that’s going to be committed to Mississippi and rural voices,” Colom added. “If you’re able to listen to those voices and make sure that you understand their needs and putting them in position to be successful, then that’s the type of leadership I want.”It’s telling that arguably the most surprising Senate victor from the midterms won’t immediately back Schumer. Colom joins several other senators and senators-elect in refusing to support Schumer becoming majority leader, and Senator Chris Van Hollen announced Thursday that he will be challenging him for the position.Major labor unions, Senators-elect Abdul El-Sayed and Peggy Flanagan, and Senator Bernie Sanders are now throwing their support behind Van Hollen. Who will Colom support when the choice comes to a vote? A year ago, President Donald Trump lied to Americans about how much Thanksgiving dinner would cost them—now the prices have only gotten worse. Last holiday season, Trump plugged Walmart’s yearly Holiday Meal promotion as proof he’d beaten the Democrats on low prices. Spoiler alert: That wasn’t true at all. Fast-forward a year, and Walmart has unveiled its newest holiday promotion, which offers a snapshot of Trump’s crumbling economy. Walmart’s newly unveiled 2026 Holiday Meal contains 17 products and can feed a crowd of 10 for a record-low price of $3.50 per person. Walmart claims that this year, shoppers will receive 18 percent more items than last year, and a 12 percent lower price for the same items compared with last year. A quick trip to Walmart’s website, however, reveals that the price of the company’s Holiday Meal has decreased by swapping the items for cheaper options, and forgoing cooking and holiday staples.While this year’s basket has more products than the 2025 Holiday Meal, which contained only 15 products and boasted feeding 10 people for less than $4 per person, the newer iteration scraps carrots and macaroni and cheese, adding corn muffin mix, sweet potatoes, mini marshmallows, and whipped topping instead.These changes can’t hide the fact that the items from last year’s basket have only gotten more expensive. A year ago, the items included in Walmart’s 2025 Holiday Meal Basket cost a total of $35.51. Now they cost a total of roughly $39.72. By comparison, the company’s original Holiday Meal, launched in 2024, included 29 items and served eight people for less than $7 per person. The items in that holiday basket now cost roughly $63.45, increasing drastically from the $55 price tag at its debut. The 2026 basket does not include certain items from the original, including onions, carrots, celery, seasoning, pecan pie, or cranberry sauce. Increasing prices are a direct result of spiking energy costs from Trump’s war against Iran, as well as his disastrous tariff policies. As of October 2026, the estimated year-over-year headline inflation rate has risen to 4 percent. The producer price index rose 0.3 percent in October, putting the annual rate at 6.5 percent, the highest rate in four years. Policymakers are beginning to worry that inflation is so widespread that it’s even starting to affect categories that are not driven by oil prices or tariffs, CNBC reported Thursday. Clearly, Americans have no illusions about how Trump’s policies have affected prices. Last week, voters issued a stunning rebuke of Republican leadership by flipping both the House and Senate blue in the midterm elections. American voters continue to be interested in affordability. At Walmart, they might get it, but with Trump, they certainly won’t. Read about the 2025 basket:Donald Trump tried to keep Jensen Huang atop Nvidia. It didn’t work.The president called Huang earlier this week, encouraging the ex–artificial intelligence chief to resist internal pressure to remove him, The New York Times reported Thursday.Huang resigned as Nvidia’s CEO, president, and board member Thursday morning, after he was caught in two scandalous affairs with direct reports, and another with a Chinese businesswoman that U.S. intelligence agencies had identified as a Chinese spy.Trump reportedly knew about Huang’s affair—and his spying partner—for months. State Secretary Marco Rubio informed Trump about the alarming relationship moments before Huang joined the presidential trip to Beijing at the president’s request. It was at least the second time that Trump had been informed of Huang’s ties to the Chinese government, inside sources told the Times.But Trump did not act on the information.Instead, the president has repeatedly denied that he had any knowledge of the illicit affair before it was unearthed by U.S. news organizations. On Tuesday, Trump refuted the Times’ report, telling a reporter in the White House press room that he “didn’t hear about” the scandal in May. Trump added that he spoke with the Nvidia leader earlier that day, sharing that Huang insisted he had “absolutely no idea that the person in question was a spy.”The president did not mention that he had also attempted to influence Nvidia’s leadership during that phone call.Nvidia emerged in recent years as the largest semiconductor company in the world, and a precious American asset in the burgeoning AI tech wave. In January 2025, Nvidia was announced as one of the “key” technology partners in the Trump administration’s $500 billion public-private initiative to jump-start AI-focused data center development, dubbed the Stargate Project. Months later, Trump allowed the company to export previously banned chips to China, loosening trade restrictions on tech that Washington feared could be used against U.S. national security interests. Yet Huang’s intimate relationship with an alleged foreign asset didn’t seem to bother the president. Instead, Trump was more focused on dollar signs, concerned about the potential financial consequences if Huang was forced out of the company he co-founded in 1993. (Trump’s interest stems beyond the broad scope of the economy, however: The president’s 2026 financial disclosures revealed that he purchased between $1 million and $5 million of Nvidia stock earlier this year.)Trump isn’t done meddling in Nvidia’s corporate decisions now that Huang is gone, either. On Thursday, the president blasted his opinion about the company’s potential succession plan on Truth Social, writing that “there is only one man to take” Huang’s place: “TIM COOK of Apple. A Legend replaces a Legend!”Two unions with a collective 700,000 members have endorsed Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen for Senate majority leader. Both also explicitly called for Senator Chuck Schumer not to run.On Friday the more than 90,000-member Office and Professional Employees International Union, or OPEIU, and the 600,000-member International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers Union, or IAM, both made their support for Van Hollen known in separate press statements.“The overwhelming support for congressional Democrats at this time in history cannot be squandered. After careful deliberation in consultation with the OPIEU Executive Board, consisting of union leaders from coast to coast, we are respectfully asking you to decline to seek to become the next Senate Majority Leader,” the OPEIU wrote in its letter addressed directly to Schumer. “The American people are desperate for change, and for a new generation of political leaders to deliver that change. We are grateful for the decades of support you’ve shown for organized labor throughout your career, but we must empower the next generation of political leaders at this pivotal time in our nation’s history.”“The IAM Union proudly supports Senator Chris Van Hollen for Senate Majority Leader. He’s a proven champion of working people who will fight to unrig an economy stacked against working families,” the union wrote in a press release.“Senator Van Hollen understands this is a fight of Workers vs. Billionaires and has the courage to deliver the change voters demanded. Workers did their part on election night. Now it’s Senate Democrats’ turn. Senator Van Hollen is the right choice.”Protest against Schumer’s leadership, which was once considered an inevitability, has grown substantially. The longtime New York senator has been criticized by the left wing of the Democratic Party for his beholdenness to Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, crypto, artificial intelligence, and corporations in general, as well as a lack of progressive vision on issues of affordability and health care. He has also been criticized for failing to adequately support the campaign of Florida Senate candidate Angie Nixon and backing moderates who failed to win Democratic primaries in Michigan and Maine. On Friday, Mississippi Senator-elect Scott Colom pushed back on Schumer’s claim that he “recruited” him.At least 10 senators or senators-elect—from Bernie Sanders to Elissa Slotkin—have refused to endorse Schumer’s leadership. That animus has also trickled down to Representative Hakeem Jeffries’s candidacy for speaker of the House, and for nearly identical reasons.Schumer still thinks he has an excellent chance at winning the leadership position.“I welcome any discussion about the future of our caucus and the important work ahead,” Schumer wrote Thursday night. “I’m proud of what we’ve accomplished together—55 seats and counting is an amazing result—and I have the votes to continue serving as Democratic Leader.”That statement was not well received, getting ratioed badly on X. Most of the comments called for him to step down.This story has been updated.