Schumer’s actions as paterfamilias of Senate Democrats are often informed by his New York sensibilities. A lifelong Brooklyn resident with the accent to prove it, Schumer is pleased by any suggestion that some of his high-touch, extroverted style is at least partially attributable to his cultural ethos as a New Yorker. He visibly brightened when I mentioned his home state in our first interview, and claimed that he can recognize the exact location of any patch of New York just by looking out a plane window. Schumer was quick to note that New York’s large rural population had given him a lot of insight into how to find common ground for relationships with senators across the country.
I'd been told previously by a political consultant that, although Schumer has been known to say knuckle-headed things about rural America, he visits every New York county during each election cycle (presumably referring to the six-year Senate election cycle). That said, for the record, this is one of the knuckle-headed things Schumer said, in 2016, about the rural vote (at least implicitly):
For every blue-collar Democrat we lose in western Pennsylvania, we will pick up two moderate Republicans in the suburbs in Philadelphia.
Ironic, huh, that he'd be dismissive of the rural vote in Pennsylvania--and presumably also nationally--but understand the need to cultivate it in his home state to secure his own staying power in the Senate.
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