Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan declined on Saturday to rule out challenging Chuck Schumer for Senate majority leader, telling an audience in Washington that Democrats need “a new generation of leadership” days after her party swept the midterm elections and took back both chambers of Congress.
Pressed at Crooked Con, an annual conference hosted by Crooked Media, on whether she would vote for Schumer or run against him, Slotkin said: “I’m not ruling anything out.” “I’ve been very vocal that we need a new generation of leadership. We couldn’t have gotten a clearer signal than Tuesday,” she said. She put the burden on Schumer: it is up to him to convince Democrats that he has a plan for wielding their new power — a plan for the first 100 days — and she said she would not vote for him if he cannot produce one.
Slotkin called the leadership question an “open field.” Votes are still being counted in Alaska and Mississippi, she noted, and conversations among the newly elected senators and the sophomore class are happening now — building what she called upward pressure for change. She made no announcement of her own. The host, Jon Lovett, noted that no woman has ever served as Senate majority leader.
Schumer, 75, has led Senate Democrats for almost a decade and has said he will be re-elected majority leader when the new Congress is seated in January. He needs only a simple majority of the Democratic caucus, projected at 54 to 56 members. But he is not an automatic choice this time: five newly elected Democratic senators have already said publicly that they will oppose him in the closed-door leadership vote, and other incoming senators are openly saying they are unsure he is the right leader for the party.
Slotkin, a former CIA analyst who served three tours in Iraq, was elected to the Senate in 2024 from a state President Trump carried, after six years in the House. She rose to national prominence in March 2025, when she delivered the Democratic response to the President’s address to Congress, arguing for bringing down prices for the middle class and securing the border while fixing the immigration system.
The majority leader’s job is the one that decides which bills ever reach the Senate floor — on prices, the border and everything else voters were promised on Tuesday. For ordinary Americans, this fight decides who will actually wield the power Democrats just won for the final two years of President Trump’s term, and whether the party that campaigned on change governs through its established leadership or hands the gavel to a new generation.
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