Sen. Chris Van Hollen of Maryland was once entrenched in the Democratic establishment. Now he is taking it on.
Van Hollen said Thursday that he would challenge Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (New York) to guide their caucus next year as some colleagues and progressive activists push for new Democratic leadership in Congress.
Van Hollen, who has emerged in the second Trump era as a progressive favorite, faces an uphill battle to unseat a veteran who is coming off a historic victories in the November election. Even if he is unsuccessful, the attempt could be a boon to Van Hollen’s public profile as he openly weighs a presidential bid in 2028.
Buoyed by a surge of online support from Democrats who wants a more aggressive fight against President Donald Trump, Van Hollen said Thursday that the election results demanded the party take a new direction and so he would run against Schumer.
“The voters called for big change, and this is a time that we have to deliver for people across the country,” Van Hollen said in an interview.
Born in Pakistan to parents who worked in diplomacy and foreign intelligence, Van Hollen, 67, grew up across Asia and returned to the United States in high school. He attended Swarthmore College, then earned a masters of public policy from Harvard University and a law degree from Georgetown University.
After a brief career as a congressional staffer — including for Charles Mathias, a liberal Republican senator from Maryland, and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee — Van Hollen entered private practice as an attorney.
He was elected to the Maryland legislature in 1990, serving for a dozen years across the House of Delegates and the state Senate.
In 2002, Van Hollen narrowly defeated a popular Republican incumbent to win a seat in Congress representing the Montgomery County suburbs of Washington. He beat establishment pick Mark K. Shriver, from the Kennedy political family, in a four-way primary.
Van Hollen rose to lead Democrats on the House Budget Committee and served in a key negotiating role with the Obama administration during the Great Recession.
He led the campaign committee that works to elect Democratic House members through the 2008 and 2010 cycles, taking over for Rahm Emanuel, who left Congress to become Obama’s chief of staff.
After winning a Senate seat in 2016, Van Hollen spent another cycle in the equivalent role for Senate Democrats.
During the contentious Democratic primary for that Senate seat, Van Hollen won as the more moderate option against a House colleague with an activist background.
But over the past two years, the public has gotten to know a different Van Hollen: a progressive fighter taking on both the Trump administration and a Democratic leadership that he has accused of being disconnected from the party’s base.
“That kind of spineless politics is what people are sick of,” Van Hollen told a cheering crowd of Iowa party activists last year, as he slammed top Democrats for refusing to endorse Zohran Mamdani, then a New York City mayoral candidate.
Though Van Hollen began to speak out at the end of President Joe Biden’s term, criticizing the Democratic administration for backing Israel as it ramped up its war in Gaza, his new star status was cemented last year during a showdown with President Donald Trump over his mass deportation program.
In April 2025, Van Hollen flew to El Salvador to meet with Kilmar Abrego García, an undocumented immigrant who had been living in Maryland and was illegally sent by the Trump administration to a Salvadoran maximum security prison.
The move was criticized by Trump, who called Van Hollen a “grandstander,” and even some fellow Democrats, who worried about the optics of defending an undocumented immigrant accused by the federal government of having gang ties. Salvadoran officials initially denied Van Hollen access to Abrego.
But photos of their eventual meeting became a rallying point for frustrated liberals as anger mounted early in Trump’s second term over his aggressive immigration enforcement policy.
Now Van Hollen is on the fringes of the presidential conversation, ahead of an open Democratic primary that is expected to pit the ideological wings of the party in a contest over its identity in a post-Trump era.
The morning after the November midterm elections, Van Hollen told The Washington Post he was thinking about how the 2028 presidential field would debate the future of the Democratic Party and whether it made sense to run himself.
Within days, he was calling colleagues about possibly leading the Senate, the unexpected vehicle for a progressive push to fully upend the status quo.
“What I’m listening for is whether they think we need to not be engaged in business as usual,” Van Hollen said Tuesday. “The question is whether the calls from around the country are penetrating the walls of the United States Senate.”
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