Follow the Money: Who Does Chuck Schumer Represent?

Before writing this week’s Follow the Money profile, I knew I would be picking a Democrat. I made this decision in large part because the previous three profiles had all covered Republicans (Andy Barr, Mitch McConnell, and Lisa Murkowski), and I wanted to make it clear that it’s not just the Republican Party that suffers from undue elite influence: the Democratic Party does, too.

I also knew that this piece would be about either Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries, since they are the two most powerful Democrats in Congress. Ultimately, though, I had to pick Schumer because he’s more powerful, more famous, and has been representing Wall Street in the Senate for entirely too long.

Now, before getting started with Chuck Schumer’s personal biography, I need to quickly note two research articles within political science that inform this series: Barber (2016) and Kujala (2020). These articles show that senators and representatives in Congress generally represent their campaign donors, not their actual voters.

Now, without further delay, let’s talk about Wall Street’s favorite Democrat in the Senate.

Who is Chuck Schumer?

Fundamentally, Chuck Schumer is a career politician who has relied on Wall Street as his private benefactor for over 50 years.

Chuck Schumer entered Harvard in 1967 with hopes of joining the basketball team. When he didn’t make the team as a freshman, he decided to join the College Democrats. There, he quickly developed serious interest in politics, and volunteered for the campaign of Democratic presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy. After graduating from Harvard in 1971, he would go on to attend Harvard Law School–arguably the most effective post-graduation move for an aspiring career politician: currently, 47 of our 100 senators went to law school, and seven of those 47 went to Harvard Law School–more than any other law school in the country.

While it is unclear whether he went to law school specifically with the plan of becoming a politician, it is clear that, by the time he completed his JD in 1974, that was the plan. He never practiced as an attorney, instead running for the New York State Assembly seat his then-friend and mentor (and eventual nemesis) Stephen Solarz had vacated while running for the US House. Schumer has held elected office ever since–over 50 years–making him the prototypical career politician. Overall, he has spent six years in the New York State Assembly, 18 years in the US House of Representatives, and another 26 years in the US Senate.

Mr. Schumer goes to Washington

During his third two-year term in the New York State Assembly, Schumer saw another opportunity to move up in his political career by running for a seat vacated by a Democrat. This time, US representative Elizabeth Holtzman vacated her seat (NY-16) to run for US senator. While Holtzman would lose to Republican candidate Al D'Amato (he’ll come back up in a minute), Schumer was able to win the seat Holtzman had vacated.

Now, the difficulty of covering Chuck Schumer’s campaign finance history is that he’s been in Congress for so long that much of the data that we have on modern congressional candidates didn’t exist (or at least wasn’t being compiled) by the FEC at the start of his career in the US House. I could not find any financial data on his first run for US House (1980) or, quite surprisingly, his last (1996). And data we do have isn’t very useful until 1988–the year in which we first have access to information about how much of Schumer’s funding came from small donors.

But we do have evidence–coming from Schumer himself–that by 1982 he had already positioned himself as a Wall Street Democrat.

Although Schumer had been close to Solarz during Solarz’ run for Congress in 1974 and followed his wake into the New York State Assembly, New York was set to lose five seats in the US House (going from 39 to 34) and, as a freshman legislator, Schumer seemed like a likely target for apportionment–in which case, he would have to face off with Solarz directly in the 1982 Democratic Primary.

After winning a spot on the Banking Committee–a key spot for someone who wants to encourage campaign contributions from Wall Street–Schumer went out of his way to solicit money from Wall Street. As reported in a 2010 article in Politico:

After winning a spot on the Banking Committee, he set about making friends on Wall Street, tapping the city’s top law firms and securities houses for campaign donations. “I told them I looked like I had a very difficult reapportionment fight. If I were to stand a chance of being re-elected, I needed some help,” he would later tell the Associated Press.

Thus, while we only know that Schumer raised about $502K for the 1982 election and that about 46% of it came in the form of large individual contributions, for the purposes of this article we’ll take it for granted that much of that 46% came from Wall Street executives, lobbyists, and attorneys.

Ultimately, that direct confrontation between Schumer and Solarz’ never took place: Schumer managed to put together an impressive war chest and the state legislature decided not to merge his district with Solarz’: Solarz kept the 13th district to himself, and Schumer’s new district would be the 10th.

The data that we have from Schumer’s House elections from 1980 to 1996 is summarized below. He is listed as having represented three different congressional districts because he served in the House long enough to sit through two reapportionment cycles (after the 1980 and 1990 censuses).

Note: the percentages are per election averages, not weighted averages.

Despite the limited data availability prior to 1988, there is enough to establish that Schumer was largely funded by elites before he ever reached the Senate. Beyond his own acknowledgement that he’d pursued Wall Street contributions in advance of his first re-election, the quantifiable data tells the same story: In each election from 1988-1994, the plurality of his funding came through either large individual contributions or PACs. Meanwhile, the highest percentage of his funding that ever came from small individual contributions during this period was 8.14%. For three elections in a row, at least 70% of his funding came from the combination of large individual contributions and PAC funding. This means that his funding came primarily from elites long before he even reached the US Senate.

Across the four House elections for which we have data on Schumer’s small individual contributions, those contributions never once surpassed even 10% of the total amount raised by the campaign. But it did dip below 1% twice, meaning that essentially no average Americans from the middle class wanted to support his campaign financially; Schumer was foisted upon them by elite donors.

In 1994–his last House election for which his campaign data is available–that number drops down to about 42.5%, with 56.5% apparently coming from sources other than large individual contributions, small individual contributions, or PAC contributions. While what happened in 1994 isn’t entirely clear, it appears that “Other,” for this year, is funding came largely from Schumer’s pre-existing war chest: according to the FEC, Schumer only spent about $387,000 out of the roughly $923,000 he received in donations, and he ended the year with $2,116,689 in cash on hand–more than he needed to run a competitive House election at that time. In other words, he’d received so much money from Wall Street and the rich that he had more than a full election’s worth of funding before even starting.

In the 1998 election, Schumer decided to run against Republican senator Al D'Amato, the man who had defeated his predecessor in NY-16, Democrat Elizabeth Holtzman, in 1980. Although D’Amato’s first run in 1980 had “only” raised about $1.55 million in 1980–making his war chest the 15th largest among all Senate candidates that year–D’Amato established himself as the most formidable fundraiser in the Senate in 1986, raising about 39% more than any other Senate candidate. In 1992, D’Amato raised more than anyone else again, this time raising about 60% more than any other Senate candidate. All this is to say: the 1998 Senate election in New York was destined to be an expensive affair.

While Schumer’s total of over $17 million raised for the 1998 election was the third-most raised out of all 239 Senate candidates that year, D’Amato raised over 60% more than any other candidate–over $27 million total. To illustrate just how expensive this campaign was compared to other Senate races, the fundraising “leaderboard” for 1998 is reported below (via the FEC):

Despite D’Amato’s decisive fundraising advantage, Schumer had advantages of his own. Where D’Amato had support from key political figures in the state–including the governor George Pataki, mayor Rudy Giuliani, and former mayor Ed Koch–Schumer benefitted from the support of the most influential Democrats in national politics: Vice President Al Gore and First Lady Hillary Clinton both personally campaigned for Schumer, while Schumer also benefitted from robocalls from President Clinton. Ultimately, Schumer won easily, beating D’Amato by over 10 percentage points (54.6% against 44.1%).

After jockeying for position in the state legislature and the US House, Schumer had completely smooth sailing once he reached the US Senate because the New York electorate is too liberal to to vote for a Republican and Schumer’s relationships with Wall Street executives dating back to at least the early 1980s made him Wall Street’s darling Democrat.

Since his first election to the Senate, Schumer has never faced a serious challenge again. In his time in his Senate, his worst fundraising performance was in 2010, when he “only” raised about $19.5 million. That year, he raised about 89 times as much as his opponent (who raised about $222,000). In other elections, Schumer’s opponents didn’t fare much better, raising less than $750,000 in each election from 2004 through 2022. In each of his four Senate re-election campaigns, Schumer faced no challenger from the Democratic Party and he has out-raised his Republican opponent by a factor of at least 33 in each of those elections. That’s obscene.

The table below summarizes Schumer’s campaign finance data from his career as a US senator, with one caveat: the “industry” leaderboard at the top of the table and the “contributors” leaderboard at the bottom include not just his Senate data but also the data from his last three elections to the US House. I didn’t take the time to separate this data that pertains to his House runs from his Senate totals for two reasons: (1) the House data has very little influence on Schumer’s career totals since the vast majority of his funding has come his Senate elections and (2) the amount of work required to parse out those House elections simply isn’t worth the marginal benefit in terms of accuracy. With that note out of the way, let’s look at the data:

Note: the percentages are per election averages, not weighted averages.

Across five Senate elections, an average of about 64% of Schumer’s funding came in the form of large individual contributions of $200 or more, while his average amount raised through small individual contributions of under $200 is about 11.5%--even more clear evidence of an elite-oriented politician.

This percentage, while already small, is actually inflated dramatically by the 2004 election cycle, in which he and many other Democratic senators received a massive influx of small individual contributions: I looked at the data for several other Democrats who were up for re-election in 2004, and each saw dramatic increases in the percentage of their funding that came in the form of small donations from their previous elections in 1998, and each saw those numbers decline dramatically in 2010. Therefore, it appears that Schumer’s 2004 spike in small individual contributions is likely driven by Democratic voters providing far more small individual contributions to senators across the board, and not some political re-orientation on the part of Schumer himself. The data from his subsequent elections supports that claim, as he received less than 2% of his funding through small individual contributions in 2010 and 2016. If we exclude 2004, the average percentage of his funding coming through small individual donations falls from 11.5% to an diminutive 4.94%. This means that outside of the 2004 election, less than 5% of his funding has typically come from average Americans.

While average Americans don’t give Schumer’s campaigns much of their money, elites certainly do. In three of his four re-election campaigns, at least 2/3 of Schumer’s funding came in the form of large individual contributions. And in each of his last three re-elections, at least 80% of his funding came from small donations or PACs. That’s the kind of politician Democrats have allowed to have their top position in the Senate.

Overall, according to Open Secrets, the industries that have contributed the most to Schumer’s campaigns in the House and Senate since 1989 are:

(1) Securities and Investment - $19,613,851

(2) Lawyers/Law Firms, and - $11,600,831

(3) Real Estate - $9,298,412

No other industry surpasses even $5,000,000.

Meanwhile, the top 5 sources of funding for Schumer are Goldman Sachs, the multinational white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss, Citigroup, Blackstone Group, and JP Morgan Chase. This accounts for both individual contributions from “employees”--mostly executives, attorneys, or lobbyists–and donations made by PACs controlled by the corporation. The table below lists Schumer’s top contributors from 1989-2024, including columns for total contributions, individual contributions, and PAC contributions:

Essentially, what you see there is a list of awful and powerful financial institutions (e.g., elites), white-shoe law firms (attorneys for elites), one of the big four accounting firms, and two energy corporations worth north of $100 billion.

What does it all mean?

As modern political science research tells us, politicians represent their donors—not their voters. And as the data tells us, Schumer is funded by elites, rather than average Americans. He will not be up for election again until 2028, but there is some reason to suspect that he is now vulnerable to a challenge. While Schumer won his first three re-elections by 71.2% - 24.2% (2004), 66.3% - 32.1% (2010), and 70.6% - 27.2% (2016), his worst performance was his most recent, when he won 56.8% - 42.8%.

Honestly, I don’t expect the Republicans to put forward a serious challenge against Schumer in 2028. The Republican Party’s donors like Schumer enough on economic issues, anyways, as he’s craftily used the veneer of bipartisanship to reject Democrats’ efforts to increase taxes and block other measures that would reduce elites’ grip on the economy.

But there have recently been rumblings about the idea of Schumer facing a primary challenger and this, I think, is more realistic. I could easily see a Democrat challenging Schumer from the left, especially if they pressure him on policies such as Medicare for All (which Schumer did not co-sponsor in 2023-24), economic inequality, and campaign finance reform. If a Democrat half his age can clearly articulate policies that speak to Americans’ economic insecurity and do so while drawing a stark contrast with Schumer, they might be able to win. However, even that would be an incredible uphill battle.

Regardless of whether a serious challenger emerges to oppose Schumer in 2028–and I hope they do–Democrats need to understand that that if they want to be taken seriously as supporters of the working class by the plurality of Americans (38%) who think that neither party works for them, Democrats in the Senate need to ditch Chuck Schumer for a new leader who is not only younger but someone whose campaign funding can actually give voters reason to think that they represent the working class. Schumer is not that guy. It is my hope that, when Democrats in the Senate pick their next leader in January 2027, they choose someone who is under 65 and who receives at least 50% of their funding through small individual contributions. A candidate like Schumer—one funded primarily through large individual contributions and relying only minimally on small individual contributions—cannot be taken seriously as someone who represents average Americans.