Chuck Schumer has a plan to seize power.
He is plotting to ascend to Senate Majority Leader and make life miserable for Donald Trump.
But he may be about to get some very bad news.
Currently, the GOP holds a 52-48 seat majority.
And in the 2018 midterms, 10 Democrats are up for re-election in states that Donald Trump won by double digits.
One of those Democrats is North Dakota’s Heidi Heitkamp.
She won a surprising victory in 2012, but now must run for re-election in a state where Trump crushed Hillary Clinton by 36 points.
Politico is reporting that Heitkamp is mulling over her future and could retire:
Heidi Heitkamp still remembers the first time she led the Senate in the Pledge of Allegiance after her surprising win in 2012; how hard it was to get the words out.
“I can’t get through it because I’m too emotional,” she recalls to dozens of gangly teenagers graduating from the American Legion’s Boys State program. “How could a middle-aged, kind of a chubby woman, be standing in the United States Senate?”
The 61-year-old Heitkamp survived a brutal bout with cancer amid a failed 2000 campaign for governor, then ran for the Senate 12 years later in a Republican-dominated state. And now she is staring down an exceedingly difficult re-election campaign in a state where President Donald Trump is beloved.
Though every Democrat from the oil patch in Williston to bustling Fargo is banking on Heitkamp running, winning and reviving the party in this state, the plain-spoken, stridently moderate Democratic Senator is months away from making it official. That’s in part because she’d far rather govern than spend 15 months talking about her campaign. But she says she’s also undecided.
“There’s days I have doubts … I mean this is a hard life. Actually, the happiest I am is on days like today,” she says on a sparkling June day as she crisscrosses the state’s southeastern corner. “You know, I haven’t made up my mind.”
If Heitkamp opts not to run, that would make the GOP heavy favorites to pick up that seat.
Given that the map is so tilted against Democrats, they cannot afford to lose any seats.
Complicating matters are the results of the special elections.
Chuck Schumer believed the media hype that voters were furious with Trump and ready to send a message to him by firing Congressional Republicans.
But Republicans won all four contested special elections.
That showed the GOP base is as fired up, if not more so, as Democrats.
That’s great news for conservatives.
With so many Democrats running in red states, the GOP has a chance to expand their majority.
It’s great news for Trump supporters who want to see the “Make America Great Again” agenda put into action.
But it’s bad news for Chuck Schumer and the rest of the left.
