El-Sayed and four other Democratic senators-elect will not vote for Schumer as leader

Abdul El-Sayed supports Chris Van Hollen as the next Senate majority leader. The senator-elect from Michigan, speaking with CNN, said he would support a challenge by the Maryland senator to Chuck Schumer, who is expected to run again for the leadership position after Democrats regained control of the Senate in the midterm elections.

Last Tuesday, El-Sayed won 52% of the vote and defeated Mike Rogers in Michigan's Senate race. As a result, the progressive will become the first Muslim senator in U.S. history.

When asked about the possibility of Van Hollen running for majority leader, El-Sayed said the following: "I am for Chris Van Hollen. If he decides he wants to be Senate majority leader, I think he’d be amazing at the job."

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"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 added.

With El-Sayed, five Democratic senators-elect have now indicated they would not vote for Schumer as leader. The other four are Adam Hamilton (Kansas), Peggy Flanagan (Minnesota), Troy Jackson (Maine), and Juliana Stratton (Illinois).

Schumer, the Senate Democratic leader since 2017, said Wednesday that he expected to be reelected, this time as majority leader. "I'll be re-elected as majority leader. But the issue is focusing on the American people and what they want," he said in his first speech following Tuesday's results.

As for Van Hollen, a leading figure in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, has spent more than a year questioning Schumer's leadership and calling for a shake-up of the Democratic leadership. However, it is unclear whether he will openly challenge the New York senator.