Senator Charles Schumer is a 20th-century politician trapped in a 21st-century Congress.

That should be a liability for the 75-year-old New York Democrat as he readies for a second sojourn as the US Senate majority leader. Schumer’s caucus, at least 54 and possibly 56 seats strong after the midterm-election landslide that swept Republicans from power, features the young and the restless — rookie lawmakers with an array of ambitions and little patience for traditional parliamentary niceties. Some Democratic senators-elect are fixated on overhauling healthcare; others are bent on upending American foreign policy or taking on immigration reform.

Navigating those issues is sure to get dicier for Schumer once the inevitable disagreements arise between progressives and pragmatists in his caucus. Maine’s Troy Jackson backs “Medicare for All”; South Carolina’s Annie Andrews opposes it. Illinois’ Julia Stratton wants to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE); Texas’ James Talarico wants to curb the agency’s excesses. Michigan’s Abdul El-Sayed wants to cut off US support for Israel; Kansas’ Adam Hamilton backs the Washington-Jerusalem alliance. And then there’s the matter of investigating President Donald Trump.

From inside Schumer’s new majority and from the outside — House Democrats, liberal activists and the party’s 2028 contenders — pressure will mount to harness congressional power to probe allegations of the Trump administration’s corruption as zealously as Eliot Ness pursued Al Capone. The Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, whose chairs can issue subpoenas at will, could figure prominently. “Lawyer up,” Representative Robert Garcia, the California Democrat set to become chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said in a two-word statement after Democrats captured a majority in the chamber Tuesday. But going that route, and concentrating too much on divisive partisan priorities, risks alienating voters.

They want a functional Congress that works with the president — a necessity in divided government — and focuses first and foremost on reducing the stubbornly high cost of living. Trump and the outgoing Republican-controlled Senate and House of Representatives found out this month what happens when frustrated voters feel betrayed and ignored. In a bit of irony, Schumer’s longevity (50 years in elected office, 45 years on Capitol Hill) and his all-politics-is-local approach make him uniquely suited to lead a Democratic caucus infused with youthful outsiders through this modern, all-politics-is-national era.

It’s a thicket of Venus flytraps that, among other hazards, often fools politicians into believing niche opinions voiced on cable news and social media are popular. As Jim Kessler, a Democratic operative who worked for Schumer early in the senator’s career, reminded me: His old boss visits all 62 New York counties every year — and insists on using a flip-phone. That keeps Schumer in touch with, if you will, real America.

He has kept winning back home, despite a decline in voter support in recent years, by delivering on kitchen-table concerns for a politically diverse range of constituents and communities that comprise a state that is so much more than New York City. It’s not that the senator isn’t a dogmatic lefty. It’s that he understands many voters aren’t, and that regardless, they value their quality of life over the ideological battles and political retribution that often consumes Washington. “Schumer is famously not online; it’s a choice to not be dragged down in the whirlpool of online discourse which can be distracting and distorting,” said Kessler, now executive vice president for policy at Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank.

“He’s made a deliberate choice to touch grass; and to remain, even as leader of the Senate, ultimately a retail politician." Schumer appears to understand the challenge ahead. “The burden’s on us to produce,” he said this week, during an interview on MS NOW’s Morning Joe.

“The No. 1 focus for us is what the American people would tell us is No. 1: costs.”Republicans will argue that Schumer long ago buckled to the progressives in his party to hang on to his leadership post. There’s some truth to their characterization. For instance, the senator has lately ratcheted up criticism of Israel. But the majority he’s assembled, including candidates he recruited personally, hardly resembles a red army that democratic socialist Senator Bernie Sanders, a Vermont independent, would prefer.

Senator-elect Josh Turek, an Iowa Democrat, received a ton of press for declaring he would cooperate with Trump on key issues, particularly border security. He was hardly alone.

The “known unknown,” as the late former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might describe it, is whether Schumer will have the fortitude to resist left-wing Democrats. They’re likely to complain — egged on by self-serving Democratic presidential candidates competing for attention on social media — that investigations into the Trump administration are insufficiently aggressive, that legislation aimed at shrinking inflation is too timid while demanding a bold wishlist of progressive policies at odds with a majority of voters.

Perhaps Schumer will assuage the predictable rise of rebels in his caucus by explaining that this isn’t his first rodeo and he’s been on the other side of what Republicans experienced Nov. 3. Twenty years ago, as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Schumer helped lead his party to a near-filibuster-proof majority by flipping 14 Republican-held seats in the 2006 and 2008 elections. In a midterm two years later, with voters feeling ignored by President Barack Obama and congressional Democrats, half of those gains went poof. Four years later, so did the rest. That’s assuming Schumer has learned the lessons of his lived experience.