Senator Chris Van Hollen, a Maryland Democrat, contended on Sunday that he has a “wide open” path to unseat Senator Chuck Schumer of New York to become majority leader next year, intensifying the internal leadership battle that is dividing the newly empowered Democratic caucus.
Mr. Van Hollen, who has positioned himself as a populist underdog, said he did not believe Mr. Schumer’s support was solid. Mr. Schumer, an architect and funder of the successful Democratic effort to retake the Senate, has announced that he has locked up enough commitments to return him to the position of leader for another two years.
“I can tell you that a number of those people on that list have actually committed to voting for me,” Mr. Van Hollen said on CNN’s “State Of The Union,” though it was not clear what list he was referring to. “The others are very open to the idea of change.”
Mr. Van Hollen had previously said he had more than 10 colleagues supporting him.
On Sunday, he said on “Fox News Sunday” that number was up to 15 and growing. “This is a wide-open race,” he said.
The winner needs a simple majority of the caucus to vote for him in a secret-ballot election that is scheduled for Dec. 1. Democrats will make up at least 55 seats in the Senate next year, including the independents who caucus with them.
Mr. Van Hollen, 67, also accused Mr. Schumer, 75, who has led Senate Democrats since 2016, of trying to change that date because he was not confident he had the votes.
“If they really believed that they were ahead, they wouldn’t be trying to move up the elections,” Mr. Van Hollen, who appeared on three different programs on Sunday morning, said on Fox News. “They’re talking about trying to short-circuit that open debate process within the Democratic caucus.”
While there has been an internal discussion by some lawmakers of moving up the date of the election to avoid a prolonged internal battle, it is not clear that the idea has gained any traction and is not being driven by Mr. Schumer himself, people familiar with the conversations said.
Mr. Van Hollen said that he differed from Mr. Schumer in his position on funding the war with Iran. He said Congress should give “not one penny more” to fund the war, using the leverage of a government shutdown next month to force the issue. Congress has a Dec. 11 deadline to fund the government to avoid a shutdown.
Mr. Schumer and other top Democrats have been weighing a temporary extension of government funding with some restrictions on the military money until early 2027, when they would hold the majority and likely be able to exert more leverage against the Trump administration.
Mr. Van Hollen also said he disagreed with Mr. Schumer’s decision to try to influence Democratic primaries during the midterm elections, particularly against Senators-elect Abdul El-Sayed of Michigan and Peggy Flanagan of Minnesota.
“He joined with AIPAC and crypto to try and defeat them,” he said, referring to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, which spent about $30 million in the competitive Michigan primary against Mr. El-Sayed.
While Mr. Schumer has been criticized for supporting some center-leaning candidates in primaries who ultimately lost to progressives, his allies noted that he recruited five winning candidates in states that Democrats flipped or are on track to do so: Mary Peltola in Alaska, Roy Cooper in North Carolina, Josh Turek in Iowa, Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Scott Colom in Mississippi.
They also noted that Senate Democrats’ campaign arm never spent money in the Minnesota Senate race.
Overall, though, Mr. Van Hollen said he was challenging Mr. Schumer because the message of the midterm elections was that the American people wanted change.
“We need to earn people’s trust, and I don’t think you do that by simply going back to business as usual,” Mr. Van Hollen said on Fox News.
