By Paul Kane, Theodoric Meyer · The Washington Post (c) 2025
Sen. Brian Schatz (Hawaii) has formally launched his campaign to take over as the No. 2 Senate Democrat, vowing to guide an “emerging generation” of the party’s leadership.
Schatz, 52, is pitching himself for Democratic whip as someone focused on the tedious work on the Senate floor jousting with Republicans to help shape the debate. A regular in the Senate gym’s pickup basketball games, Schatz likened his approach to how some people “just love rebounding,” diving into scrums for loose balls that are not pretty but can determine the outcome.
“Not everybody loves the aspect of politics that occurs on the floor,” he said in an exclusive interview Sunday with The Washington Post, formally declaring a campaign that many of his colleagues have already embraced. “This is where I think I can be most useful.”
Schatz, who joined the Senate in late 2012, is the first official candidate to succeed Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois), who announced last week that he would not run for reelection next year after two decades as whip.
Other potential candidates to succeed Durbin as whip include Sens. Amy Klobuchar (Minnesota), who holds the No. 3 leadership post, and Patty Murray (Washington), the top Democrat on the Appropriations Committee, who left elected leadership two years ago after a long run at the table.
Klobuchar declined to comment Monday on whether she plans to run for whip.
“It’s my job to keep us unified and focused on the devastation that has been wrought by Donald Trump’s policies,” Klobuchar said, referring to her role as chair of the Senate Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, the No. 3 slot in the party’s leadership hierarchy. “So that is what I’m doing now.”
Schatz, who has been Durbin’s deputy whip for several years, has built a team of loyalists who span the regional and ideological gamut of the Democratic caucus but skew toward the newer generation of senators.
Helping round up votes for him are Sens. Cory Booker (D-New Jersey), who gained acclaim with liberal activists for a 25-hour marathon speech several weeks ago protesting President Donald Trump’s early actions in his term; Mark Kelly (D-Arizona), the former astronaut and anti-gun-violence leader who was a finalist for the vice-presidential nomination last year; and Jacky Rosen (D-Nevada), who has preached bipartisan work and won tough Senate races.
“I think he’s going to have very broad support,” Kelly, first elected in 2020, said in a telephone interview Sunday.
Schatz and Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-New York) are close, but Schumer has not endorsed a successor to Durbin yet. Schatz said that he does not expect Schumer’s help in his race.
Durbin told reporters Monday that he had no plans to back anyone in the whip race, though he allowed that he believes one senator was best equipped to succeed him.
“I don’t have any plans of endorsing because I won’t be voting in that race,” he said.
The Durbin succession race will play out amid the backdrop of a party looking to find its next generation of leaders.
Since early 2005, Senate Democrats have had three figures at the top of their caucus ladder: Harry M. Reid (Nevada), who spent 12 years as leader before retiring; Schumer, 74, who chaired Democrats’ campaign operation and eventually succeeded Reid in 2017; and Durbin, 80, who has been their deputy for more than 20 years.
Joe Biden, 82, bowed out as the party’s presidential nominee last year after public appearances suggested he was not up to the task. A trio of Democrats who are now in their 80s – Rep. Nancy Pelosi (California), Steny H. Hoyer (Maryland) and James E. Clyburn (South Carolina) – filled the top leadership posts in the House for more than 15 years, before passing the torch in early 2023 to Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-New York) and a team of much younger leaders.
Last month, after Schumer enraged House Democrats by rounding up support for legislation to fund federal agencies rather than force a standoff with Trump, some Democrats accused Schumer of being out of touch with that moment.
Schatz, who stayed loyal to Schumer as one of just nine in the caucus to vote to advance the bill, suggested that there is an “emerging generation in Senate leadership” that he wants to help lead.
Booker, 56, who arrived in the Senate a few months after Schatz, now holds the No. 4 leadership spot. On Sunday, just before sunrise, he took a spot on the Capitol steps with Jeffries, 54, to begin a daytime session streamed online talking to activists, some of whom showed up in person, with thousands more watching online.
Schatz views his job, if his colleagues elect him in the secret ballot after the 2026 elections, as trying to elevate other Democrats and tap into their expertise on issues and their diverse backgrounds.
“One of my tasks is to make sure that they’re all maximally successful. We’ve got lots of talent,” Schatz said.
Kelly, sensitive to the many colleagues who are older and longer tenured, agreed that Schatz is a “spring chicken” in the Senate but dismissed the “generational thing” as missing the bigger fight right now with the Trump administration.
“That’s the fight we have right now,” Kelly said.
He recounted how, soon after he arrived four years ago, Schatz helped senators like him deal with the grueling “vote-a-rama” sessions in passing the early phase of the Biden agenda. He advised them how this byzantine amendment process could help or hurt them politically back home.
“There was one guy in particular who was in touch with what’s going on in our states,” Kelly said.
“I have seen Brian Schatz in action helping get the votes necessary to pass some of the most consequential legislation in generations,” Rosen said in a statement.
“He’s one of the most thoughtful people I know and represents a new generation of forward-thinking Democratic leadership. He would make an excellent whip,” Booker said.
Schatz is far from a household name, not someone who makes the rounds on prime-time cable shows or on the Sunday political news chat shows.
Klobuchar, 64, first elected in 2006, has maintained a higher profile as a 2020 presidential contender who performed well in debates and nearly won the New Hampshire primary.
Murray, 74, first elected in 1992, has chaired three legislative committees, had two stints overseeing the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and served more than 10 years in other junior leadership posts.
Schatz has played an inside game, including hiring Durbin’s longtime adviser, Reema Dodin, to prepare him for the whip’s job. He brought Rosen to Hawaii to raise money for her 2018 Senate race when she was just a first-term member of the House and stumped for her reelection last year in rural parts of her state.
Late Sunday morning, he showed up at the Capitol to join Booker and Jeffries to denounce Trump.
Schatz has embraced the Hawaii tradition of sending its lawmakers to Congress and expecting them to stay for decades, bringing home as much federal money as possible.
Schatz succeeded the late Daniel Inouye (D), who was awarded the Medal of Honor for his World War II service and served nearly 50 years in the Senate, running the subcommittee overseeing Pentagon funding for decades.
“This is the only job I want,” he said of being senator.
Schatz has stayed relatively quiet in terms of diagnosing the party’s 2024 face-plant, but he is beginning to open up more about the perceptions of how Democrats in Washington have been timid toward confronting Trump.
“A little too much self-punditry. We’ve gotten a little too precious in finding the right tactic,” he said Sunday, pointing at Booker’s recent actions being largely symbolic but demonstrating his sense of what is at stake. “We should just do it all, all at once.”
And the Jeffries-Booker session at the Capitol demonstrated how Democrats were, at least for now, past their mid-March fight over which tactics to deploy against Trump.
“There’s just too much at stake to bicker among ourselves,” Schatz said.