For an hour on Sunday night, Senator Chuck Schumer endured insult after insult. He was called a liar and a failure. He was blamed for inflation, the decline of the shipbuilding industry, and death threats to Supreme Court justices. He was referred to as a modern-day Goliath, a “blind biblical giant,” a surprising description of a senator famed for both his spectacles and his slouch.
Mr. Schumer took it all, seemingly treating the excoriation from his Republican opponent, Joseph Pinion, as an extended opportunity to remind voters of a series of Democratic accomplishments over the last two years during his tenure as Senate majority leader, a role he is clinging to even as his party faces serious headwinds in midterm elections next week.
Democrats across New York and the nation are playing defense in the closing week of the campaign cycle as they try to protect their party’s control of the Senate and especially the House of Representatives, where Republicans are feeling bullish. That includes in New York, where the map includes competitive congressional races from Long Island to central New York, and where Gov. Kathy Hochul is trying fend off a challenge from Representative Lee Zeldin, a conservative Republican with deep ties to former president Donald J. Trump.
Mr. Schumer does not seem in any danger: He is heavily favored to win a fifth term in the Senate, with a recent Quinnipiac poll showing him holding a 12-point lead. But it is a measure of where things stand for Democrats that Mr. Schumer was willing to trade time on Sunday night to trumpet his party in exchange for absorbing Mr. Pinion’s brickbats, which included a near-constant assertion that the senator has been in office too long.
“Chuck Schumer has spent 42 years making promises about what he will do tomorrow,” said Mr. Pinion, 39, a former host and conservative commentator on the Newsmax network. “It’s always a day away. And you never trust a man who promises to do tomorrow what he had power to do yesterday.”
For Mr. Pinion, the debate at Union College in Schenectady, hosted by Spectrum News, was perhaps his best chance at introducing himself to voters, a challenge considering the Quinnipiac poll found nearly 60 percent of those polled didn’t know enough about Mr. Pinion to form an opinion. (That cohort seemingly included Mr. Schumer himself, who opened the debate by saying, “Hi, Joe. Very nice to meet you.”)
Mr. Schumer has long prided himself on an aggressive media strategy — reporters can set their watches by his 11:30 a.m. news conferences — and his frequent trips around the state, including visiting all of the state’s 62 counties every year, a pace he has continued even as Democrats seek to shore up support for Ms. Hochul and other candidates.
That included a visit last week to Onondaga County, alongside President Biden, to bring attention to a $100 billion plan by Micron to build new computer chip manufacturing facilities near Syracuse.
“This guy gets things done,” the president said of Mr. Schumer, during the event.
Such was the argument the senator himself made on Sunday night, returning again and again to legislation passed by Democrats while he has served as majority leader, including measures to reduce the price of prescription drugs, tighten gun control laws, and pour money into manufacturing like that in Onondaga County.
“Under my leadership, the Senate has had the most productive session in decades,” he said.
Mr. Pinion has also stumped for months, roaming from motorcycle-and-morning coffee events in Western New York to rooftop fund-raisers in Manhattan to help fuel an underfunded campaign: Mr. Pinion’s latest filing, for example, with the Federal Election Commission shows his campaign committee with a little less than $12,000 cash on hand.
How Times reporters cover politics. We rely on our journalists to be independent observers. So while Times staff members may vote, they are not allowed to endorse or campaign for candidates or political causes. This includes participating in marches or rallies in support of a movement or giving money to, or raising money for, any political candidate or election cause.
Mr. Pinion has seemingly tried to augment that lack of resources with a surfeit of fiery rhetoric and CGI-heavy broadsides: One of Mr. Pinion’s online ads shows him in an apocalyptic landscape, amid the burning ruins of skyscrapers and the Statue of Liberty.
“America is burning,” Mr. Pinion says, criticizing the federal outlay of dollars to Ukraine, high inflation and the baby-formula crisis. “And the politicians that started the fire want to blame someone else.”
In another ad, he likened Mr. Schumer to a dinosaur presiding over “the Jurassic States of America,” a visual conceit complete with Mr. Pinion flanked by a pair of raptors. “Like my friends here, the American dream is about to go extinct,” he says, before turning to his prehistoric friends. “Sorry, guys, it’s true. You’re dead!”
But his most recurring campaign theme has been that Mr. Schumer has been in Washington too long — nearly 42 years, between nearly two decades in the House of Representatives and his four terms in the U.S. Senate — with too little to show for it. A recent email blast noted that Mr. Schumer “has been in office longer than I have been alive.”
“He says the job’s not done,” Mr. Pinion told a crowd in Amsterdam, N.Y., in September, alongside Representative Elise Stefanik and Michael Henry, the party’s candidate for attorney general. “If you haven’t got the job done in 42 years, perhaps its time to step aside and let some one else take a crack at it.”
Mr. Schumer’s ads have showcased working-class supporters, as well as mailers linking Mr. Pinion to anti-abortion efforts by Republicans, including Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Senate minority leader.
Like Mr. Pinion and his dinosaurs, Mr. Schumer has also shown a sense of humor, with an ad billed as “Yiddish Lessons with the Majority Leader.” In it, Mr. Schumer, who is Jewish, identifies Mr. McConnell, Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, and Mr. Trump as “schmos”; the riots of Jan. 6, 2021 as a “shande,” or shame; and mentions the words “kvell” and “naches” for his pride and joy at his legislative accomplishments.
“Because fighting for New York is no schtick for me,” he concludes.
On Sunday, Mr. Pinion was on the attack from the very beginning, calling out “the legend of Charles Ellis Schumer” before saying he wanted to do “some myth busting.”
“He is, in fact, an exceptional politician, one of the best that has ever lived,” Mr. Pinion said. “But he’s a failed senator. He has failed the people of this state on multiple occasions.”
Mr. Schumer rarely returned fire, sticking to promoting the raft of accomplishments that he hopes voters remember next week. But toward the end of the debate, he scolded Mr. Pinion, saying the race wasn’t about how long he had served, but whether he had delivered for New York.
“I produce results, I am productive,” he said. “I’m not just shooting verbiage, and calling names.”
Source: Elections - nytimes.com
