WASHINGTON — Adam Schiff will start his Senate career with more clout than most newcomers — and more instant suspicion from the Trump loyalists who will dominate Washington policy-making.

President-elect Donald Trump has hated Schiff for years, and said so, sometimes in crude terms. In turn, Democrats have a history of rallying around the Los Angeles politician, usually in very public ways.

“He certainly comes with more notoriety. I think there are some people in the Senate who may challenge him because of the work he did in the House,” said Sen. Jon Tester, D-Montana, one of the Senate’s more moderate Democrats.

Schiff, 64, will be sworn in Monday as California’s junior U.S. senator this month. A congressman since 2001, the Democrat became one of the few in his party to win a new congressional office this year by a big margin, trouncing Republican Steve Garvey 59% to 41% last month for a full six-year Senate term.

In an interview with the Sacramento Bee, Schiff said his priorities will include whether to confirm Trump’s nominees and later this winter, extend the 2017 Trump tax cuts, which expire at the end of next year.

Concerns about Democrats

While his votes are likely to mirror others in his party, Schiff suggested he is not not entirely comfortable with Democrats these days. Trump was the first Republican presidential candidate to win the national popular vote in 20 years, and Republicans will control both Houses of Congress for the first time in six years starting next month.

Schiff remains fiercely loyal to his party, but also sees flaws.

Democrats in the November election were not “bold enough and clear enough in our economic remedy and plans to overcome the wave of anti-incumbent sentiment going around the world,” he said.

He recalled how people would say they wanted more details about the economic plans of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee.

“My feeling is this really wasn’t an election about policy. It was more an election about who is speaking to me and what are they going to do to improve the quality of my life, and who do I have confidence in to improve the quality of my life,” he said.

Exit polls showed that roughly three out of four Americans were angry and dissatisfied with how things are going.

The election “was personal,” Schiff said. “It was how people felt about how they were doing relative to how they had been doing and how others were doing,” said Mark Baldassare, survey director at the nonpartisan Public Policy Institute of California.

Not the usual freshman

Schiff will join Sen. Alex Padilla, D-Calif., in the Senate. Schiff replaces Sen. Laphonza Butler, D-Calif., who was appointed last year to fill the seat of the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Butler did not seek another term.

Feinstein was a senator for 31 years, acquiring considerable clout, particularly on spending, where in recent years she was a senior-member of the budget-writing appropriations committee.

Neither Padilla, a senator since 2021, or Schiff will have that sort of power for some time.

But Schiff enters the Senate with some unusual advantages and disadvantages. He is well-known as the outspoken chairman of the House Intelligence Committee from 2019 to 2023, and was lead prosecutor in the Senate’s 2020 Trump impeachment trial. The president was acquitted.

Trump and other Republicans have bitterly criticized him. Trump has called Schiff “crooked,” “shifty,” and a “slimeball.” He urged supporters to buy a $28 T-shirt with Schiff’s face with a pencil for a neck and a flashing clown nose. “Everyone should buy a Pencil-Neck Adam Schiff shirt today!” Trump tweeted. Earlier this year, Trump suggested he was an “enemy from within.”

The Republican-led House took the highly unusual step of voting to censure Schiff last year after he claimed Russian collusion with the Trump administration in 2016.

The censure resolution cited the congressman for talking about allegations concerning Trump and his campaign’s alleged ties to Russia in 2016 as well as a phone call between Trump and the Ukrainian president.

The resolution noted that Special Counsel John Durham concluded that the FBI should not have launched a full investigation into connections between Russia and the 2016 Trump campaign. Schiff countered that some “are working overtime to excuse the facts and evidence of Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. All to protect Trump.”

As a result, Schiff became a hero to Democrats and a pariah for Republicans–and now someone likely to get the sort of attention freshmen senators don’t usually get.

“He will be very high profile,” said Darrell West, a political analyst at Washington’s Brookings Institution.

Being careful

Democrats are looking for new voices — but is Schiff too polarizing?

“In the Democratic Party, being hated by Trump is an asset. On issues where Democrats think they can compromise with Trump, he might not be the best lead-off batter. But on issues where they want to drive Trump nuts, he’s the man,” said John Pitney, professor of American government at Claremont McKenna College.–

Schiff knows he needs to be careful. “On the pro side I come in with a large platform and a voice that people know and that gives me the ability to influence events to some degree,” he said. “On the con side there are a bunch of Republicans in the Senate who only know me from Fox, only know me from the caricature.”

But the Senate is still a cozy club of 100, where personal relationships override the most bitter of differences. It usually takes 60 votes to get anything done, and Republicans will control 53 seats.

In the Senate, said Tester, “Your enemy today is your friend tomorrow. You don’t want to take people and push them away because you’ll need them.”

Trying to win bipartisan support and encouragement is “critical,” said Butler.

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., one of Trump’s strongest Senate advocates, agreed.

While he said Schiff does bring more notoriety than most new members, he added, “the Senate is a humbling place. There’s a lot of things to do in this place but I still believe fundamentally relationships are important,” he said.

Can he be influential?

Just where Schiff can first exert influence is unclear. Committees are where legislation is written, and assignments have not yet been announced.

A former prosecutor and Harvard Law School graduate, he has been serving on the House Judiciary Committee. Padilla already sits on the Senate Judiciary Committee, which now has 21 members, but Schiff could join him.

The committee is the first stop for considering federal judgeships. Traditionally the president goes along with the home state senators’ choices, regardless of the lawmaker’s party.

Where Schiff could first become visible is during the anticipated winter debates over taxes and the budget. Republicans are eager to extend the Trump-backed 2017 tax cuts, many of which expire at the end of 2025. Schiff, along with every House Democrats, voted against the bill.

Schiff supports middle class tax cuts, but not the lower rates for the wealthy included in the 2017 law. He also wants an unlimited state and local tax deduction restored for families earning less than $400,000.

He’s likely to be outnumbered, since Republicans are expected to use a procedure that would only require 51 votes for passage.

Still, if Trump continues his rants against him, will he be able to be a spokesman for such ideas? How does he handle that?

“It helps to have a very thick skin. It helps to have a very strong wife which I do,” Schiff said. “The problem with all his attacks and in particular the rhetoric about the enemy within and all that is it reaches people who are unwell so it poses real personal security challenges which I can’t ignore.”

He recalled an incident during the first Trump administration when his wife was very upset.

“It was at night and she was in the kitchen and...it must have been some new threat that we received and some of them went right to her phone. And I said what’s wrong, what’s wrong? She said I can’t stand the fact that millions of people hate you,” he recalled. “They just hate you.”

But Washington is all about politics — all about, as Trump might say, the art of the deal.

“I think if you asked people in the House 10 years ago and you said who would become this liberal lightning rod no one would have named me,” Schiff said.

©2024 McClatchy Washington Bureau. Visit at mcclatchydc.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.