Longtime Maryland Rep. Steny Heuer has yet to announce whether he will seek reelection next year in his 24th term in Congress.
If so, he will face the major challenger making Heuer's age – the House of Representatives will turn 86 next month and at the end of the next semester, he will be 89 – at the heart of his campaign.
“If you live here in southern Maryland, I would like to ask you a tough question,” volunteer firefighter and emergency services consultant Harry Jalin, 35, announced his candidacy on Thursday.
“We are in a real crisis moment. Radical Republicans are burning our country around us. Our friends and family who work in government are losing their jobs. We continue to send politicians like Steny Heuer back over and over again,” Jarrin said.
Party vice-chairman sets firestorms by pushing to Democrats in the elderly home
Democrat Harry Jarin, seen in the campaign launch video, is taking on a major challenge in the 2026 elections by longtime Maryland Democrat Steny Heuer. (Harry Jalin for Congress)
“This is the bottom line. We don't put out the fire by sending the same people who spread it. We send firefighters,” Jarin said. “Maryland deserves a new generation of leadership and I'm ready to start the fight.”
Fox News reached out to Hoyer's office for a response, but a spokesman refused to respond.
Hoyer, who first won a seat in Congress in the 1981 special election from 2003 to 2023, was the second ranking House Democrat behind Rep. Nancy Pelosi. He served as a House majority leader from 2007-2011 and 2019-2023 when Democrats controlled the Chamber of Commerce.
Along with Pelosi, Heuer resigned from his long-standing leadership position at the end of 2022, but remained in Congress.
Democrats predict House Republicans will pay for passing Trump's “big, beautiful bill.”
“I think we've all been around for a while and we've almost felt the timing of the decision, and I think all three of us felt this was back then,” Heuer told CNN at that point.
Heuer has long been a leading supporter of top Democrats issues, and during his second tenure as a House majority leader, he played a key role in passing then-President Joe Biden's so-called American rescue plan and bipartisan infrastructure law.
A longtime Democrat from Maryland, a former House majority leader, will face major challenges if he decides to seek re-election in 2026. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc, Getty Images)
He represents the Democrat-controlled 5th Congressional District in Maryland. It covers the area known as southern Maryland and includes suburbs south and east of Washington, D.C., suburbs Baltimore and Annapolis suburbs, and rural areas further south.
Heuer, who suffered a mild stroke last year, is the latest High Rank House Democrat facing major challenges from his younger counterparts.
Pelosi, Brad Sherman of California and Jan Shakowsky of Illinois, brought out key challenges and later announced that Shakowsky would not run for reelection.
The main challenge arises as the party is still trying to restructure following the election setback in November last year, when it loses control of the White House and its Senate majority and is short on their bids to regain the House.
The party's bases are angry, and four months after President Donald Trump returned to the White House, he began to oppose the drastic and controversial moves.
Moreover, much of that rage and energy is directed at fighting the White House and Congressional Republicans, some of which are aimed at Democrats who have not spoken enough to make efforts to stymie Trump.
At the same time, other longtime housing Democrats in the safe blue district face the potential of major challenges.
David Hogg, vice-chairman of the Democratic National Committee, seen here on August 22, 2024 in Chicago, has pledged to support the major challenges for the old House Democrats in the Blue District. (Photo by Dominic Gwinn/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images)
This has pledged to spend millions of dollars through his outside political groups, David Hogg, the newly elected Democrat National Committee vice-chairman last month, supporting the key challenges for what he called House Democrats “sleeping on the wheels.”
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The move by Hogg, 25, a survivor of the horrifying shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in South Florida seven years ago, spent money on fellow Democrats.
