Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) has never faced a revolt like this before.

The broad left has never pulled its punches when it comes to the eight-term senator, suspicious of his Wall Street ties and unhappy with willingness to strike deals with Donald Trump. But it’s not the Left that Schumer has to worry about these days. Over the past week, Schumer has faced an unprecedented barrage of often public criticism and rebuke from within his own party, longtime Democratic loyalists, and party-aligned media outlets.

The point of controversy was Schumer’s decision to cave on the congressional standoff over an impending government shutdown. While many Democrats, even those in tough districts, favored using the risk of a chaotic shutdown as leverage to extract concessions from Trump and Republicans — reversing some of his most damaging cuts, for instance, or carving out protections for Medicaid and Social Security — Schumer argued a shutdown would be too disruptive and harmful, potentially giving Trump’s administration new opportunities to extract even more government cuts, and lent the crucial Democratic support needed to get the spending bill over the line.

This did not go down well. Anger at Schumer soon exploded from hardcore Democratic partisans, whether Center for American Progress head Neera Tanden, pundit Will Stancil, or Pod Save America co-host Dan Pfeiffer. Susan Rice, a former advisor to two Democratic presidents, admonished him to “please grow a spine,” while one state party chair simply said of Schumer: “He sucks.”

Members of Congress breached decorum to hit Schumer for folding, whether his former ally in Democratic leadership Nancy Pelosi, progressives like Ro Khanna and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, or centrist lawmakers like Sean Casten, Ted Lieu, or the ones who privately urged Ocasio-Cortez to challenge Schumer for his seat, even offering to bankroll her run.

A Change.org petition calling for Schumer’s resignation has more than 43,000 signatures at the time of writing, notable less for that number than for who started it: Charlotte Clymer, a well-known Democratic partisan who previously defended Schumer. What was at first a call last week from just the pro-Democratic group Indivisible for Schumer to resign is now a call from five of them, with four youth groups, including the College Democrats of America, publicly demanding he step down. Now, multiple Democratic members of the House and even Senate have joined these calls.

This outbreak of party dissatisfaction is borne out in polling. Among Democratic voters alone, Schumer’s favorability rating is underwater at -2 points in an Economist/YouGov poll taken over March 16-18, meaning after the shutdown controversy. His job approval rating has a slightly worse -4 net rating among those same Democratic voters.

By contrast, look at the same poll taken just a week earlier: at that point, his net approval rating among Democrats was +23 points. That’s a collapse of nearly 30 points among loyal Democrats in just a single week. (Bear in mind Schumer’s ratings among non-Democratic voters have been consistently bad for years.)

Schumer has never been in this kind of trouble before since he became the party’s Senate leader in 2017. Throughout Trump’s first term, Schumer enjoyed robustly positive approval ratings from Democratic partisans, even as he was constantly criticized by the Left.

Look at 2018, when Schumer rankled the Left by striking a deal fast-tracking Trump’s judicial picks and appearing to back giving Trump more than a billion dollars to fund the border wall. “WTF is Schumer doing?” asked ThinkProgress, an outlet once dismissed by Tanden herself as being full of “crazy leftists.” Progressive commentators fantasized about Ocasio-Cortez primarying Schumer, as Vox warned there was an “emerging liberal blowback” against him, “especially among progressive activists.”

Yet none of that really translated into any meaningful drop in support. Schumer was easily reelected to his leadership role by acclamation, and his approval rating in several different polls through the year was at 50 percent or higher, down from but more or less consistent with his rating a year earlier. In fact, just two months after progressives cried betrayal over border funding, Schumer was practically unassailable among Democratic voters: in January 2019, he registered approval ratings from them of +41 and +33, as well as a massive +75 among New York state voters.

This phenomenon continued the rest of that year. Over the course of 2019, Schumer was criticized by progressives for cutting Wall Street a break by failing to nominate a Democrat to the Securities and Exchange Commission, praising the notorious Islamophobe Peter King while attacking a progressive colleague for criticizing the power of American Israel Public Affairs Coalition, and, most controversially, letting through a border funding bill that effectively gave Trump a blank check. That last one saw progressive lawmakers and aides erupt in outrage, saying things like, “I’m pissed” and “Chuck Schumer fucked us.”

Again, none of it seemed to matter. Schumer still had an array of strongly net positive approval ratings from Democratic voters by early 2020, whether polled by Morning Consult, the Economist/YouGov, or Gallup.

So these are uncharted waters for the Senate Democratic leader, just as they are for the Democratic Party more broadly. Both are suffering a crisis of legitimacy as a result of an unprecedented collapse of trust and support from their own voters and party base, who overwhelmingly think party leaders aren’t fighting the Trump administration hard enough.

Where this all leads is impossible to say. No doubt it will restart speculation about a future primary challenge from a progressive like Ocasio-Cortez — speculation that may have looked premature back in 2019 and 2020, when Schumer had an iron grip on the party’s rank and file, but not so much anymore, with the leader’s numbers in the doldrums and Ocasio-Cortez topping a poll of Democrats asking which leader “best reflects the core values” of their party.

But one thing’s for sure: without a massive change, either in leadership, strategy, political pitch, or all of the above, this is an untenable situation for a political party, especially one that is disliked even more intensely by every other voter in the country, as the Democratic Party is. The plan of Schumer and some in the party was to simply “play dead.” The way things are going, they soon won’t have to pretend.