El-Sayed says he’d back Van Hollen as majority leader over Schumer

Abdul El-Sayed, Michigan’s newly elected Democratic senator, reupped his calls Thursday morning for Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) to become Senate majority leader over current Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.)

In an interview on “CNN News Central,” El-Sayed echoed his May endorsement of the Maryland senator for the role.

“I’ve been very clear: I think he’d be an amazing Senate majority leader,” El-Sayed told CNN’s Kate Bolduan on Thursday. “Of course, that’s a choice he has to make about whether or not he wants to pursue that.

“It seems like he’s quite interested in another goal politically,” he added, in apparent reference to speculation around whether Van Hollen will run for president in 2028.

Van Hollen endorsed El-Sayed in his Senate bid — as did Schumer and other top Democratic lawmakers. At a July campaign rally, El-Sayed introduced the Maryland Democrat to a crowd of supporters as the “ next Senate majority leader .”

Newly elected Senate Democrats in Kansas , Illinois and Maine have all publicly stated they would not back Schumer as majority leader.

On Wednesday, progressive group Indivisible called for Democrats to replace their current minority leader, saying the midterm election results indicated the American public wanted a “ new generation of American fighters .”

“We need a leader in the Senate who is capable of leading that fight,” the nonprofit group wrote on social media Wednesday. “It’s time for Senate Democrats to choose new leadership.”

El-Sayed refused to explicitly say “who I’m not for” in this leadership contest and said he would examine other candidates if Van Hollen was not interested in the position.

“I am for Chris Van Hollen,” he told CNN. “If he decides he wants to be Senate majority leader, I think he’d be amazing at the job.”

“But absent him, the question for us is, all right, who are the other options here and who is going to get us to a point where we are passing legislation, putting it on the president’s desk and forcing him to make a decision so that we can talk about what we did with the mandate that we had to be able to address the affordability crisis in people’s lives,” he continued.