Symone Sanders-Townsend is a longtime operative in the Democratic Party.
The MSNBC host served as the press secretary for the 2016 presidential campaign of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, then joined the 2020 primary campaign for then-former Vice President Joe Biden.
From there, she served in the last administration, specifically as the chief spokesperson for now-former Vice President Kamala Harris, also working as her senior adviser.
Sanders-Townsend has poured the last decade or more of her life into Democratic politics, but the current weakness of the party means that even she has had enough.
She blasted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, during Saturday’s taping of “The Weekend” on MSNBC, noting that he helped to pass a six-month government funding effort led by Republicans, according to a report from the Daily Beast.
As a resident of Washington, D.C., Sanders-Townsend likewise declared that she is “pissed” since Congress cut $1 billion of funding from the federal district.
“There’s actually little that the Senate minority leader can say and the ten Democrats that voted with the Republicans can say to appease somebody like me,” she complained.
“I’m going to change my registration to independent.”
Sanders-Townsend asserted that Democratic lawmakers should have launched a more fervent effort to stop the spending bill.
Is the Democratic Party currently weaker than you’ve ever seen it?
MSNBC host Symone Sanders Townsend left her panel speechless after declaring live on air that she will leave the Democratic Party to become an Independent. pic.twitter.com/CRfMWKJaMG
— Karli Bonne’ 🇺🇸 (@KarluskaP) March 17, 2025
“There’s not another option for Senate or House Democrats to effectively push back,” she added.
“This was it. They blew it.”
Referring to the Republican resistance to former President Barack Obama, Sanders-Townsend predicted that “the Democratic Tea Party was born the same day that Chuck Schumer took to that podium to read that very well-crafted statement that told us he folded like a paper napkin.”
The complaints from Sanders-Townsend show that the Democrats are indeed in a difficult spot.
On their right flank, they are losing people who are tired of men in women’s sports, open borders, and other facets of particularly unhinged Democratic policies.
On their left flank, they are losing people like Sanders-Townsend, who are annoyed that Democrats are not more emphatically resisting the Trump agenda, despite the American people clearly voting for such an agenda last year.
It’s no wonder that Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer are perceived as waffling.
They are trying their hardest to govern while also holding together a vast coalition with internal factions increasingly pitted against one another.
There could be a way to keep beltway progressives like Sanders-Townsend satisfied, while also giving a voice to the union factory worker from the Midwest, the urban black man who lost his job to an illegal immigrant, and the suburban soccer mom who is a bit skeptical of how many vaccines her kids have to take these days.
If there is a way to keep that coalition together, especially amid the ascendance of the Trump administration, the Democrats have definitely not found it.
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