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Swing-state Democrats turn on 8 centrists not facing reelection over hijacked shutdown

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1 month ago

November 11, 2025

The deal cut by some Senate Democrats to reopen government has refueled the party’s tussle over strategy and identity just days after sweeping election victories had raised hopes that the left’s disparate factions were pulling in the same direction heading into the 2026 midterms.

Democrats’ latest fault lines do not track perfectly along the familiar split between progressives and centrists. Instead, there’s renewed rancor over how aggressively to fight President Donald Trump and his compliant GOP majorities on Capitol Hill, with some progressives renewing their calls for Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer to step aside, even as he publicly opposes the latest deal.

The left flank is incensed that eight centrist senators — none of whom face reelection in 2026 — crafted a deal with Republicans that does not guarantee Democrats’ main demand to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies that will expire at the end of the year. They say the agreement means Schumer could not hold his caucus together.

Some moderates are frustrated, or at least caught on a political tightrope after more than a month of Democrats agreeing that the longest federal shutdown ever was the way, finally, to use their limited influence to achieve some policy and political wins in a Republican-dominated capital.

Party leaders including Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries continue blaming Republicans for the looming premium spikes and other shutdown ripples, but the standoff’s sudden end underscores the difficulty of maintaining Democrats’ fragile and fractious coalition.

“The Republicans have learned they could hurt our communities, they could hurt everyday people, including their own constituents, and Democrats will fold,” said Maurice Mitchell, who leads the progressive Working Families Party.

New Jersey Gov.-elect Mikie Sherrill, who won by more than double Democrats’ 2024 margin in her state, said victories like hers showed voters “want leadership with a backbone” who “stay strong under pressure.”

Instead, she said, “The Senate is on the brink of caving.”

Democrats’ dealmakers say there was no viable alternative

The Democrats who cut a deal counter that they had little choice — that Republicans weren’t budging, and the pressure of the prolonged shutdown had become untenable as the Trump administration withheld food assistance payments to low-income Americans and mandated flight delays at airports strained by a shortage of air traffic controllers.

Democrats settled for a pledge from Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., to hold a December vote on ACA subsidies, along with assuring back pay for federal workers who’ve missed paychecks, among other policy details.

“This was the only deal on the table,” said Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H.

Democrats pointed to Trump, after the GOP’s electoral defeats, calling on Republican senators to end the filibuster and bypass the minority altogether. That, the centrists argued, showed Trump could not be maneuvered into negotiations — though Republican senators were pushing back to defend the filibuster.

“After 40 days, it wasn’t going to work,” Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said of Democrats’ demands.

Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, Schumer’s deputy, said the shutdown “seemed to be an opportunity to lead us to a better policy. But it didn’t work.”

That did not convince many center-left and swing-state Democrats.

Senate holdouts included Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, who won her seat in 2024 at the same time Trump won Michigan and other industrial Midwest battlegrounds, and Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff, the only Democratic senator running for reelection in 2026 in a state Trump won in 2024.

“Premiums are set to double for 1.4 million Georgians and nearly half a million Georgians could lose health insurance altogether,” Ossoff said in a statement, before shifting blame to the GOP. “The President refuses to fix it and withholds SNAP benefits while the House has not even to come to work for six weeks.”

Mallory McMorrow, a Michigan state senator running for U.S. Senate, said the situation embodies a larger issue for the party, with Democrats playing by the usual set of rules while Republicans use more brazen tactics.

“It makes you wonder what was the fight for? Why the sacrifice?” McMorrow said, adding that some senators govern out of “nostalgia” without understanding a new landscape. “A refusal to evolve and recognize this is not the same Senate that it was a decade ago or even five years ago means that the party is never going to win.”

The deal highlights Democrats’ generational divides

None of the eight senators at the center of the agreement face voters in 2026, and they have an average age exceeding 65. Shaheen, 78, and Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, 80, already have announced their retirements ahead of the midterms.

Shaheen found herself at odds with her daughter, 51-year-old Stefany Shaheen, who is running for Congress in New Hampshire. The younger Shaheen noted House Speaker Mike Johnson’s refusal thus far to schedule a House vote on the ACA insurance support.

“We need to both end this shutdown and extend the ACA tax credits,” she said in a statement. “Otherwise, no deal.”

It’s a difficult turn, especially, for Schumer. The 74-year-old New Yorker faced withering critiques for not shutting down government in the spring. The mention of his name last Friday at CrookedCon, a gathering of progressives in Washington, drew jeers and boos, even as he remained dug in for the latest shutdown fight.

The age of Democrats’ national leaders and the related assertion that they’re out of touch with the base have been defining aspects of the party dynamic for several years, with Joe Biden being the oldest president in U.S. history and having to be forced out of a reelection bid at the age of 82. But Biden and former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who is retiring from the House at age 85, got credit for muscling through significant legislation with thin Democratic majorities.

Schumer, 74, played a key role in those accomplishments, too, leading Senate Democrats during Biden’s presidency. But he’s sometimes gotten less credit from party activists, and now he faces criticism for not keeping his caucus together in the latest shutdown fight, even with public polling and election outcomes suggesting voters were siding with Democrats.

“The best way to unify the Democratic Party and win big in 2026 is to make clear that the new generation of Democratic senators we elect will NOT be following Chuck Schumer down a losing path,” Progressive Change Campaign Committee chief Adam Green wrote to the organization’s supporters Monday, as he called for Schumer to step aside.

Senate candidate Graham Platner, who is running against Maine Gov. Janet Mills for the right to challenge Republican Sen. Susan Collins, also said Schumer should hand over caucus leadership.

“People are fed up with this,” Platner told Our Revolution activists on a Monday conference call. The deal, Platner said, “is just one more very stark piece of evidence to show that he is just completely unable to rise to this moment.”

Dems still want Republicans to own health care cuts

Durbin and others argue the six-week shutdown yielded something tangible because it elevated the healthcare issue. The promised Senate vote, they reason, will put each Republican on record and ensure Trump and his party will again have to take responsibility for any negative effects on people around the country.

“We get our day in court in December,” Durbin insisted.

Mitchell, meanwhile, said progressives already are looking ahead to 2026, starting with Democratic primary fights up and down the ballot.

“We don’t take any pride in the capitulation of our friends inside the Democratic Party,” he said. “But the story writes itself for why we need a fighting opposition party right now.”

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Business

Co-working provider JustCo CEO sees commonalities with hotels: ‘It’s a hospitality business’

Published

7 hours ago

December 12, 2025

Jace Porter

Kong Wan Sing, the founder and CEO of JustCo, one of Asia’s largest co-working space providers, doesn’t quite think of himself as leading an office company. Instead, he sees parallels with a different property business: Hotels.

“It’s a hospitality business. People come to us not just for the network, but also for the hospitality,” he told Fortune. “You need to serve them. You have to take care of their needs, like serving the customers who are coming to look for them in the office.”

Kong and JustCo are expanding their presence in Asia even as employers and employees continue to fight a battle about flexible work and returning to the office. Globally, corporate giants ranging from Amazon to JPMorgan have called workers back to the office full-time. But employees tout the benefits of working from home and hybrid work, forcing employers and office designers to get creative in how they bring people back.

The company is also expanding into new markets regionally, including Malaysia and India. In the longer run, they’re also looking to move into countries in North Asia and the Middle East.

“After entering all these markets, we will be truly covering all the key cities in Asia-Pacific,” says Kong. He’s even considering returning to mainland China, after JustCo exited the market in 2022 due to tight social distancing regulations during the COVID pandemic.

JustCo just entered the Vietnam market with a new office along Ho Chi Minh City’s waterfront. The Vietnamese city is the tenth urban market in Asia for JustCo. It’s also a return of sorts for Kong, who was first exposed to the idea of a flexi-office in Ho Chi Minh City several decades ago.

JustCo’s story

Kong Wan Sing founded JustCo in Singapore in 2011. Following a regional expansion drive in 2015, it now operates 48 offices across Asia-Pacific, including in major cities like Seoul, Bangkok, Taipei, Melbourne, and Sydney. Kong himself hails from a family of entrepreneurs; his parents operate garment factories in nearby Malaysia. “There’s genes inside me to build a business,” he says.

In the early 2000s, Kong was an employee of Singaporean real estate investment company Mapletree, working out of a flexi-office in Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh City. (A flexi-office is a modern workspace where employees don’t have assigned desks, but instead choose from various work zones including hot desks, quiet pods, and collaborative areas.)

The experience opened his eyes to the value of flexible workspaces, and he saw a business opportunity in Asia, where such spaces were still few and far between.

Kong notes that, just three years ago, just under 4% of all offices in Asia-Pacific were flexi-offices. It’s since risen to over 5%, but that’s still half the level seen in more developed markets in Europe and the U.S. Yet JustCo’s CEO says he’s seeing a “surge” in Asia: “The growth is definitely much faster than European or American countries.”

JustCo also leases small offices for businesses to rent. Sixty percent of JustCo’s clients are multinational corporations looking for space for a regional office, Kong said. Companies like Chinese tech giant Tencent and U.S. vaccine maker Moderna use JustCo for their local offices.

New brands

JustCo has since broadened its offerings to potential renters, launching two new brands: “THE COLLECTIVE” and “the boring office.”

The former is a luxury co-working space, equipped with premium white-glove services like daily breakfasts and aperitif hours, and twice-a-day office cleaning. The first such space was launched in Tokyo in March.

“Japan is a very mature market, and people in Japan—they appreciate luxury stuff,” said Kong, when asked why the country was chosen to debut its premium brand. Kong and his team has since launched THE COLLECTIVE in Bangkok and Taipei; the company will bring the concept to Singapore and India in 2026.

“The boring office” sits on the other end of the spectrum, catering to firms that want a stripped-down solution. “When you go to the boring office, there’s no cleaning [of rooms] every day, only once a week,” Kong says. “And the pantry is a very basic pantry that provides only water—there’s no coffee, nothing.” The first space under that brand was launched in Singapore in July.

These three brands cater to companies’ differing needs, and are priced along a sliding scale.

The firm’s luxury offices are 20 to 30% more costly than the classic JustCo workspace, while the boring office’s spaces are cheaper by roughly the same amount, Kong explains.

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Business

Creative workers won’t be replaced by AI, they will become ‘directors’ managing AI agents

Published

9 hours ago

December 12, 2025

Jace Porter

AI won’t automate creative jobs—but the way workers do them is about to change fundamentally. That’s according to executives from some of the world’s largest enterprise companies who spoke at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco earlier this week.

“Most of us are producers today,” Nancy Xu, vice president of AI and Agentforce at Salesforce, told the audience. “Most of what we do is we take some objective and we say, ‘Okay, my goal is now to spend the next eight hours today to figure out how to chase after this customer, or increase my CSAT score, or to close this amount of revenue.”

With AI agents handling more tasks, Xu said that workers will shift “from producers to more directors.” Instead of asking, “How do I accomplish the goal?” they’ll instead focus on, “What are the goals that I want to accomplish, and then how do I delegate those goals to AI?” she said.

Creative and sales professionals are increasingly anxious about AI automation as tools like chatbots and AI image generators have proved to be good at doing many creative tasks in sectors like marketing, customer service, and graphic design. Companies are already deploying AI agents to take on tasks like handling customer questions, generating marketing content, and assisting with sales outreach.

Pointing to a recent project with electric-vehicle maker Rivian, Elisabeth Zornes, chief customer officer at Autodesk, said that the company’s AI-powered tools enabled Rivian to test designs through digital wind tunnels rather than clay models. “It shaved off about two years of their development cycle,” Zornes said.

As AI takes on some of these lower-level tasks, Zornes said, workers can focus on more creative projects.

“With AI, the floor has been raised, but so has the ceiling,” she added. “We have an opportunity to create more, to be more imaginative.”

The uneven impact of AI

The shift to AI-augmented work may not benefit all workers equally, however.

Salesforce’s Xu said AI’s impact won’t be evenly distributed between high and low performers. “The near-term impact of AI will largely be that we’re going to take the bottom 50 percentile performers inside a role and bring them into the top 50 percentile,” she said. “If you’re in the top 10 percentile, the superstar salespeople, creatives, the impact of AI is actually much less.”

While leaders were keen to emphasize that AI will augment, rather than replace, creative workers, the shift could reshape some traditional career ladders and impact workforce development. If AI agents handle entry-level execution work, companies may need to hire fewer people, and some learning opportunities may disappear for younger workers.

Ami Palan, senior managing director at Accenture Song, said that to successfully implement AI agents, companies may need to change the way they think about their corporate structure and workforce.

“We can build the most robust technology solution and consider it the Ferrari,” she said. “But if the culture and the organization of people are not enabled in terms of how to use that, that Ferrari is essentially stuck in traffic.”

Read more from Brainstorm AI:

Cursor developed an internal AI help desk that handles 80% of its employees’ support tickets, says the $29 billion startup’s CEO

OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap says ‘code red’ will force the company to focus, as the ChatGPT maker ramps up enterprise push

Amazon robotaxi service Zoox to start charging for rides in 2026, with ‘laser focus’ on transporting people, not deliveries, says cofounder

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Business

Trump says ‘starting’ land strikes over drugs in latest warning

Published

9 hours ago

December 12, 2025

Jace Porter

President Donald Trump said the US would be “starting” land strikes on drug operations in Latin America, though again declined to provide details on when and where the escalation of his military campaign would actually begin, or if countries could still do anything to avert the threatened action.

“We knocked out 96% of the drugs coming in by water, and now we’re starting by land, and by land is a lot easier, and that’s going to start happening,” Trump told reporters Friday in the Oval Office.

The US president for days has been pledging to broaden the effort, which comes after the Pentagon has launched a series of attacks on what it has called drug-smuggling boats in international waters off the coast of South America.

While Trump’s posturing has largely been seen as a pressure campaign against Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, he on Friday insisted the land targeting may not only impact Venezuela.

“It doesn’t necessarily have to be in Venezuela,” he said, adding that “people that are bringing in drugs to our country are targets.”

Trump has justified the actions in part by framing the fight against drug smuggling as akin to combat operations. He told reporters that if overdose deaths were counted like combat deaths, it would be “like a war that would be unparalleled.”

Striking targets on land would represent a major escalation, and Maduro earlier this week said that if his nation came under foreign attack, the working class should mount a “general insurrectionary strike” and push for “an even more radical revolution.”

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