An online petition urging House Democrats not to elect Hakeem Jeffries as the next Speaker of the House has garnered over a million signatures. Similar backlash has also greeted Chuck Schumer and the possibility that he could become Senate majority leader.

Coming on the heels of the “blue tsunami,” in which Democrats secured a majority in both the House and the Senate, the revolt against both Jeffries and Schumer shows that there is still widespread discontent with one of the two major parties of capital and a desire for change. Far from being a mandate for the Democratic Party, the election results signaled a complete rejection of Donald Trump and his program which was predicated on tax cuts for the wealthy, attacks on immigrants and democratic rights, and the expansion of imperialist war abroad — all while working people faced rising inflation and higher cost of living. With inequality at its highest level in the country since the Federal Reserve began tracking the data in 1989, the midterms showed a deep desire for an end to austerity.

With the promise of “affordability,” the Democratic Party was able to capitalize on this discontent, but it now has to deliver at a moment when few trust it to. NBC’s final poll before the election found that the Democrats’ lead came mostly from anger at Trump and the GOP, not active support for Democrats. According to the survey, despite widespread enthusiasm at the polls and voters expressing they preferred a Democrat-controlled Congress, the party’s approval rating stood at just 29%, reflecting a continued wariness towards the party.

The backlash now, against two pillars of the Democratic Party’s establishment is perhaps the most salient example of this phenomenon. Both Jeffries and Schumer, who are currently the House and Senate minority leaders respectively, have dramatically low approval ratings across the board. Only 18% of voters view Jeffries favorably. Schumer, who has led Senate Democrats for over a decade, has an approval rating of a dismal 13%.

In addition to the petition’s million-plus signatures, Congressional Democrats say that they’ve received hundreds of calls since last Tuesday urging them not to elect Jeffries as Speaker or Schumer as Senate majority leader. At the center of this backlash are their records on Wall Street and Israel. Both are leading allies of financial capital in Congress and have long championed the Zionist state and its political aims.

Not only have they received millions in funding from AIPAC over the years, but Schumer and Jeffries have spent years treating opposition to Israel’s genocide in Palestine as a form of hate, even as millions across the country are increasingly souring to the Zionist state. Indeed, Israel’s favorability among Americans is now at a record low, compounded by the continuation of the genocide and the expansion of war in the region. A New York Times/Siena poll in May found that 74 percent of Democratic voters oppose military and economic aid to Israel. Years of livestreamed genocide have brought tens of thousands of students, workers, and anti-Zionist Jewish people into the streets. This, coupled with a continuing war that has made clear to many that there is always money for war and nothing for working people — even as costs rise — has helped turn opposition to Zionism from a fringe position into a mainstream one. It has pushed the Democratic Party’s own voters far to the left of its leaders on Israel. Yet just this year, both leading Democrats spoke at AIPAC’s donor summit in February, mere weeks before the United States and Israel attacked Iran. Any opposition Jeffries and Schumer have voiced to the subsequent war in Iran — an issue that fueled much of the anger expressed at the polls — has focused largely on whether Congress approved it.

Now, as calls to replace Schumer and Jeffries grow, the progressives who led the charge this midterm cycle, channeling this anger against Israel and Big Capital, are weighing their options. In the House, DSA-backed progressives like Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier from New York, Adam Hamawy from New Jersey, and Melat Kiros from Colorado have refused to commit to Jeffries so far. For her part, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is increasingly a figurehead of the progressive movement, said that House Democrats were united behind Jeffries’s leadership.

In the Senate, Bernie Sanders, while maintaining his support for Jeffries, has said that he won’t be backing Chuck Schumer for majority leader, saying it is “time for change.” Among the incoming class, both Abdul El-Sayed from Michigan and Peggy Flanagan from Minnesota have indicated that they want Chris Van Hollen as majority leader. Van Hollen, who had initially said he didn’t want the job, has now said he’s in “listening mode.” Van Hollen, despite his criticism of Israel’s genocide and support for Medicare for All, is no outsider and has said he hopes the next leader will offer new plans and commitments without breaking with the party’s main donors. In plain speak? It means a friendlier face of the same party, one that is still answerable to Wall Street and the pro-Israel lobby—the very forces that have long run the Democratic Party and that millions just voted against.

Regardless of the outcome of the current struggle over Jeffries and Schumer, the growing debate shows that working people no longer want to go on as before. But reclaiming control over our lives can’t be tied to choosing different managers at the top, especially when they attempt to tie our fate to the interests of a capitalist, imperialist state.

History has already borne witness to this. In 2006, Democrats took control of Congress, riding on the widespread rejection of the Iraq war, only to continue funding it while in office. In 2008, in the face of the Great Recession where working people lost their jobs and homes, Democrats won a 257-seat majority in the House, along with the Presidency, which they used to rescue Wall Street.

A new generation is now awakening to political life, refusing to continue as before and demanding that the rich pay for the crises they’ve created. The fight against war and genocide, for healthcare for all, for housing, and for taxing the rich will not be resolved from above, by a party and a political caste beholden to the same interests that got us here. As Minnesotans showed earlier this year, when they mobilized in schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces to kick ICE out of their communities, we have to harness our anger and mobilize from below, uniting our struggles against imperialism and war with the fight for a different future so we can win each and every demand. And it will take building our own political, class-independent power: a party of our own, independent of the two parties of capital, and one that can organize the power of our class to fight every attack and for a socialist future.

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