Senate Majority Leader John Thune and Minority Leader Chuck Schumer both lack something that their respective predecessors had plenty of: thick political skin.
The South Dakota Republican is known for his genial nature and Upper Plains niceness, not for picking fights. The New York Democrat has expanded the official leadership team to at least a dozen senators and is always in contact with all 47 members of his caucus, whose phone numbers he’s committed to memory.
Ask just about any senator, former senator or current and former senior advisers and the same phrase gets mentioned about Thune and Schumer’s style: They like to be liked.
That was never the case with their predecessors, Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky) and the late Harry Reid (D-Nevada).
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McConnell, who led Republicans for 18 years until January 2025, and Reid, who served 12 years as leader until January 2017, understood that the modern congressional leader’s job is to take incoming political fire.
Both of them saw being unpopular — particularly with the Beltway media industrial complex — as a job requirement for Senate leaders in the 21st century. They took the arrows, sometimes from their own side and oftentimes from the other party, so other senators could avoid the political hits.
“I know you won’t have any trouble finding my enemies,” McConnell told Michael Tackett for “The Price of Power,” the 2024 biography of the longest-serving Senate leader.
“The only person whose approval Harry Reid cared about was his wife, Landra, and his kids and his family. Other than that, he didn’t give a damn what you thought,” Sen. Chris Coons (D-Delaware) said, admiringly.
But Republicans and Democrats grew tired of those approaches over the years, and when it came time for choosing successors, they both turned to leaders with a lighter touch.
Schumer’s defenders point to the heavy legislative output of 2021 and 2022, when Democrats passed a sweeping agenda that dealt with combatting the coronavirus pandemic and boosting the economy while eventually passing an ambitious law that was meant to battle climate change.
“Always available, always responsive and always listens, no matter who you are in the caucus,” said Coons, who was first elected in 2010 and served with Reid for six years and now almost a decade under Schumer. “The caucus has more regular, direct access to Chuck Schumer than we ever had with Harry Reid.”
And Thune had a productive 2025 in shepherding the massive tax-cuts-and-border-security legislation to President Donald Trump’s desk last July, along with confirming hundreds of the president’s nominees to the executive and judicial branches.
“You are only the leader if there are followers, and Leader Thune has a strong following in the U.S. Senate. He is appreciated and deeply respected,” Sen. Steve Daines (R-Montana) said of Thune.
But Thune and Schumer now find themselves locked in similar situations. Their party’s activist bases are upset with the results under their leadership. Both are unpopular in their home states, with their own party’s voters giving them lukewarm support at best.
Thune has spent the entire spring locked in a simmering feud with Trump over the president’s push to abolish the legislative filibuster and pass a law that would impose national, conservative policies on election laws.
Perhaps more importantly, he’s also been unable to restrain Trump from publicly attacking other Senate Republicans.
Trump’s furious criticism of Sen. Thom Tillis (R-North Carolina), whom Thune sided against in negotiations on last summer’s policy bill, helped prompt Tillis to not seek reelection this year, leaving Republicans in a difficult spot for the midterms. Trump then endorsed primary opponents against Sens. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana) and John Cornyn (R-Texas), helping assure they both lost last month.
“I always thought that that was one of the principal jobs of the leader, protect the members,” Cornyn said Thursday. He suggested Trump was easier to deal with for McConnell during his first term, when Trump did not endorse any challengers to an incumbent Senate Republican seeking reelection.
“This is a totally different environment. I mean, that was normal during normal times, and this is not normal,” Cornyn said.
Trump did offer support Wednesday for Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine), a moderate who has opposed many Trump policies, but not with the traditional “complete and total endorsement” he usually offers candidates.
“She’s a sane person,” the president told reporters.
Schumer has faced endless criticism from left-wing critics for not fighting Trump harder, particularly after compromising in the spring of 2025 to avoid a government shutdown. A rump caucus of Senate Democrats has emerged to endorse more fiery, liberal candidates in several key contests this year, many of whom are vowing to not support Schumer for leader.
Thune and Schumer both have terms up in 2028, and some quietly wonder whether either, or both, will retire from the Senate rather than face the gauntlet of their respective parties’ angry bases.
The November elections will give one of the leaders a reprieve, for at least a few months, depending on which side ends up with the Senate majority.
All this political toxicity has left some observers wondering whether the era of Senate leaders serving long tenures is over. (McConnell was the longest-serving leader ever; Reid was tied for fourth longest ever.)
“It’s increasingly difficult to lead in this environment in Washington,” said Daines, who decided to retire at the end of this year after two terms.
Not that long ago, Reid and McConnell played the insider game with an approach meant to win over Senate backrooms and not worry about what was said about them on the Sunday talk shows.
In 2008, after Barack Obama’s presidential victory came with coattails giving Democrats a massive Senate majority, members of Reid’s caucus demanded he punish then-Sen. Joe Lieberman for endorsing Obama’s opponent, Sen. John McCain of Arizona.
Lieberman had won his 2006 reelection as an independent but caucused with Democrats and chaired the homeland security committee.
“I have to ask you to give up your chairmanship,” Reid told Lieberman in a late-2008 meeting recounted in Jon Ralston’s “The Game Changer,” the defining biography of Reid.
When Lieberman said no, Reid said he knew that would be the answer and wasn’t about to punish the Connecticut senator and risk losing him to the GOP conference. So they worked together to overwhelmingly defeat a motion to punish Lieberman, as Reid took the heat from angry liberals.
A year later, Lieberman was a key vote against an expanded government health-care plan supported by many Democrats.
“I don’t agree with him myself,” Reid told Democrats at a meeting, according to Ralston. “But we need his vote to get the rest of this bill done.”
Reid sided with Lieberman again, and a few months later Obama signed the Affordable Care Act, his signature policy legacy, into law.
McConnell faced similar pressure from Trump and his right flank in early 2020 when Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) cast the only GOP vote to convict Trump in the first impeachment trial.
Like Reid with Lieberman, McConnell rejected attempts to punish Romney, knowing he would be needed for key votes down the road.
“We don’t have any doghouses here,” McConnell told reporters. “The most important vote is the next vote.”
Their biographers see clear differences in how the leaders go about their business.
“Schumer is a different animal. I don’t think he has Reid’s thick skin or battle-ready armor,” Ralston, the CEO and founder of The Nevada Independent, told NOTUS.
Tackett, the deputy Washington bureau chief for The Associated Press, contrasts Thune’s early life as a tall athlete who played college basketball with McConnell struggling to overcome polio, never becoming a sports star.
“Thune is used to being the leader in a physical sense. He’s used to being on a team. I think he lacks McConnell’s ruthlessness,” Tackett told NOTUS.
Some senior advisers suggest Schumer’s accessibility makes his leadership style almost too diffuse, and involves too much deliberation, but ultimately Schumer makes the final call.
Thune’s defenders point to the majority leader’s polite-but-steady rejections of Trump’s efforts to gut the legislative filibuster or fire the Senate parliamentarian, or both, as ways to more easily pass his agenda.
“We don’t have the votes for it,” Thune told Fox News’ Bret Baier last month, knowing there’s a large, quiet bloc of Republicans that wants to keep the 60-vote threshold for major legislation as a hallmark of the Senate.
Old-time institutionalists have a split verdict on Thune’s management of the Senate. “He stood up to Trump on the filibuster, which is the essence of the Senate, the ability to force compromise,” former Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tennessee), a close McConnell ally, told NOTUS in a recent interview.
Alexander, however, said Republicans have been too timid in opposing Trump’s more controversial actions and often don’t stand up for “the Senate’s constitutional prerogatives”.
Both Thune and Schumer remain more popular inside their respective caucuses than is understood outside the Senate, with a majority of members believing today’s politics are almost impossible to navigate.
“What both Leader McConnell and Leader Thune have faced, it’s increasingly difficult to lead,” Daines said.
And Coons suggested senators may never again seek out the demeanors of Reid and McConnell for their leaders, recalling an early meeting with Reid when he asked for his advice, but was met with his brusk nature.
Reid asked where the committee chair was on the policy issue, as well as the labor unions and trial lawyers. They all supported Coons’ position, which was all Reid wanted to hear.
“Then why,” Reid replied, “are you bothering me?”
With Schumer, Coons said, “You can call him any hour of the day or night, or weekend, or weekday, and he takes your call, and he listens.”
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