As Zohran Mamdani was making history in New York City on Tuesday night, telling supporters at his victory party that “the future is in our hands,” Senator Chuck Schumer was far away on the sidelines, watching one of the biggest political moments in his hometown’s recent history from Washington, D.C.
The Senate Democratic leader was busy, certainly, helping his caucus navigate the government shutdown. But he was also decidedly not on the Mamdani bandwagon, having chosen not to endorse his party’s nominee for mayor of his own city, even at the risk of looking out of touch with the prevailing energy back home.
If Mr. Schumer’s plan has been to keep Mr. Mamdani at a distance, the senator has ended up being the one who appeared distant — less the avatar of re-energized Democrats than a leader from an earlier era. In the meantime, a young mayor-elect rallied the party’s troops to victory and forged a new political coalition in the process.
“In some ways, his silence itself is a strong statement,” said Ana María Archila, a co-director of the left-leaning New York Working Families Party. “It speaks to a kind of unwillingness to wade into the waters of what the future of the party should be.”
The Rev. Al Sharpton, the New Yorker and civil rights leader who did not endorse but hosted Mr. Mamdani at events, was even more blunt, suggesting that Mr. Schumer’s arms-length treatment of Mr. Mamdani showed that the senator did not fully grasp “the momentum and feeling and passion that was driving a lot of voters” in his hometown.
The rise of Mr. Mamdani, 34, comes at a complicated moment in the career of Mr. Schumer. Long a lion of New York politics and a key architect of election wins for Senate Democrats over the decades, Mr. Schumer, 74, presided over the loss of the majority in 2024 and faces a tough Senate midterms map in 2026. It now looks to some Democrats as if he doesn’t understand that the party needs to change, or possess the communication gifts needed to win in the midterms. It’s a striking development, given Mr. Schumer’s long embrace of the kind of kitchen-table issues that Mr. Mamdani has repackaged as an affordability agenda.
To some extent, Mr. Schumer has been here before. As he approached re-election in 2022, he made a point to build relationships with the party’s left, including with Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a progressive star whose rise stunned the establishment. At the same time, centrist Democrats were urging him to mind the middle so he could keep the party’s then-Senate majority intact.
Now, with Democrats eager to reclaim power, the question is whether veteran leaders like Mr. Schumer can figure out how to meet the political moment and carry the Democrats forward.
Mr. Schumer, for his part, seems eager to look ahead.
He and Mr. Mamdani had a phone call on Wednesday morning to discuss their shared goals of tackling affordability and mounting opposition to Mr. Trump, according to people familiar with their call. And in an interview, the senator dismissed concerns that by declining to back Mr. Mamdani, he was out of touch with the base of the party he was supposed to be leading.
“Through many different mayors and many different philosophies, I have had a North Star: help New York, which I love,” Mr. Schumer said. “That is not going to change.”
Mr. Schumer’s allies and several other Democrats argued that the prospect of endorsing Mr. Mamdani, a democratic socialist and vociferous critic of Israel, was more complicated than a simple embrace of a party nominee by the senator, who is the highest-ranking Jewish elected official in the country.
“Senator Schumer has had to balance the energy that Mamdani has inspired with young voters with the reticence older voters and the business community have felt toward the mayor-elect, with Israel being another complicating factor,” said Ben Tulchin, a Democratic pollster who worked for Mayor Eric Adams’s 2021 campaign and polled for the business community in this election.
Some Democrats close to Mr. Schumer said his posture toward Mr. Mamdani was also shaped by the senator’s focus on helping his party pick up Senate seats next year in key states like North Carolina and Ohio, where being linked to Mr. Mamdani’s politics risks turning off moderate or conservative-leaning voters.
Stu Loeser, a former Schumer aide and a political strategist, said Mr. Schumer’s decision to remain silent in the mayoral race might ultimately benefit New Yorkers. If Democrats can win back control of the Senate, it would help Mr. Schumer secure more funding for the city.
“It’s far more likely that someone in Forest Hills, North Carolina, misunderstands Chuck Schumer and Mamdani than someone in Forest Hills, Queens, where they’ve got to know Chuck Schumer and they’ve gotten to know Mamdani over the last few months,” he said.
Mr. Schumer was far from the only prominent Democrat to withhold support from Mr. Mamdani. The mayor-elect won without endorsements from New York’s other Democratic senator, Kirsten Gillibrand; its state party chair, Jay Jacobs; or Hillary Clinton, the former New York senator and the last Democratic presidential nominee from the state, who expressed reservations about him in the final stages of the election. Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the Democratic House minority leader, endorsed Mr. Mamdani only toward the end of the race and never campaigned alongside him.
Mr. Schumer often chooses not to put his thumb on the scale of city races. He did not endorse Mr. Adams until days before his election in 2021, and for months, he didn’t go into details when asked why he withheld his backing from Mr. Mamdani. Still, he likes to celebrate his ties to local lawmakers and his instincts and knowledge about the needs of New York. Landon Dais, a freshman state assemblyman from the Bronx, said, “If you’re an elected official, you need to show up in the community. And he does.”
Mr. Schumer has known Mr. Mamdani for several years and connected with him before he launched his mayoral bid. In 2021, Mr. Mamdani’s first year as a state assemblyman, the two worked together to assist thousands of taxi drivers who were facing paralyzing debt after years of exploitative practices in their industry. Mr. Schumer and Mr. Mamdani filmed a video together, interviewing their driver from the back seat of a cab.
In his mayoral campaign, Mr. Mamdani focused on an affordability message that Democrats across the country raced to emulate and launched a youth movement in New York City that some voters compared to Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign. His campaign also resonated with a broad multiracial coalition that Democrats have hoped to keep from a rightward drift. Election results showed Mr. Mamdani with advantages in precincts that were home to mostly Black, Asian and Hispanic residents.
In Mr. Schumer’s Brooklyn precinct, Mr. Mamdani won 76 percent of the vote on Tuesday.
Rebecca Katz, a veteran political strategist whose firm worked for Mr. Mamdani, said that Mr. Schumer’s reluctance to endorse the Democratic nominee risked sending a negative signal to voters who embraced Mr. Mamdani and whom high-ranking Democrats hope to keep activated next year.
“For the next generation of Democrats, they understood that the Democratic leaders were not behind Zohran Mamdani,” she said.
Of course, in addition to New Yorkers, Mr. Schumer, as Democratic leader, must think about a second constituency: his caucus of 45 senators. Republicans are racing to cast Mr. Mamdani as the radical new face of a left-wing Democratic Party and to tie him to Democratic candidates around the country. Even in liberal New York City, some Democrats noted, nearly half the electorate voted against him.
“The result yesterday was not an overwhelming mandate,” said Howard Wolfson, a Democratic strategist and former deputy mayor of New York who has advised Mr. Schumer.
Mr. Wolfson added that Mr. Schumer’s “job is to win Senate seats.”
On that front, the senator is focused on trying to end the government shutdown on Democrats’ terms and gain any advantage possible for his party against Republicans in next year’s Senate midterms. At some point, he will also focus on his own future, making a decision about whether to run for re-election in 2028. If he does run, he could face a progressive primary challenger; some on the left would like to see Ms. Ocasio-Cortez run.
Several allies say that scoring Democratic victories next year would be a more powerful confirmation of the senator’s political judgment than his decision-making on Mr. Mamdani. In the end, those allies say, Mr. Schumer wants to go out on top, from a position of power and strength.
Annie Karni contributed reporting from Washington.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
Katie Glueck is a Times national political reporter.
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