What Is Hakeem Jeffries’s Plan for the Midterms, and After?

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1:43Hey, Jason. Hey, Tyler. So you just wrote a long profile of Hakeem Jeffries, who was the House Minority Leader. And the story opens with this kind of dramatic anecdote of Jeffries trying to figure out how to respond to a video that was posted on Donald Trump's Truth Social account that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes. Can you tell us a little bit about this opening and why responding to this video and kind of calculating the response and what that would look like was so important to Jeffries? Like why this was such a critical moment for him and why you decided to open the piece with this?

2:22Well, I think Jeffries is aware of the Democratic base's dislike of him. And that dislike is really based on what they view as him being just not strong enough in his opposition to Trump. And I think he knows that that critique exists. And I think he has tried to answer that in a number of different ways. I think the second thing that was going on in that instance was, you know, Hakeem Jeffries is black. He is the highest ranking black elected official in the United States. And I think that he was personally offended. Over the years, he had criticized Trump many times for Trump's handling of racial issues, of Trump's statements about race.

3:04But he was always very careful. And he made this point himself when he offered those criticisms that he was never calling Trump a racist and that he wouldn't go that far. And I think in this instance, seeing that video and being as angry as he was about it, I think he was sort of feeling like maybe I shouldn't draw that line anymore. And he knew he needed to respond. And when it came time to do the response, he was in between meetings of political donors. He wanted to do a direct-to-camera, he said. So he had an aide film it on the aide's iPhone. And he came out and he said, fuck Donald Trump, which for Hakeem Jeffries is like a shocking statement.

3:38I mean, he is someone who, you know, I don't think has ever cursed in public before. And as I understand it from like his aides, like really doesn't curse in private either. As soon as he said it, I think he had maybe some second thoughts. He made sure that his staff, when they edited the video, would bleep out that language. and I think once the once the video went live and it got a very positive reaction from people who oftentimes are quite critical of Jeffries for not being strong enough they loved hearing him say fuck Donald Trump even like ministers you know pastors were pulling him aside to tell him how much they appreciated him saying that so I think he felt good about all of that but then when I was talking to him about the episode he was you know going over all the support uh the statement received he he still seemed kind of uncomfortable with the whole thing and then you know wouldn't even repeat the words, fuck Donald Trump, kept on talking about those three words.

4:26And then at one point he admitted that he hadn't heard from his mom yet about, and that was still kind of, that was a concern for him that his mom hadn't weighed in. And I thought that just, you know, that kind of perfectly captured who Jeffries is and the difficulties he is having and the challenges he's facing navigating this particular political moment. That's Jason Zengerle, a staff writer at the New Yorker who just wrote a profile of Hakeem Jeffries, the House minority leader and one of the Democratic Party's most important figures. After Democrats failed to retake the House in 2024, many in the party viewed the upcoming midterms as a clear path back to power, given Donald Trump's historically low popularity.

5:08That victory would likely make Jeffries Speaker of the House, but recent redistricting setbacks have complicated Democrats' chances. And even if the party does win back the chamber, there are lingering questions about what kind of speaker Jeffries would be, given his more restrained style of leadership in comparison to someone like Nancy Pelosi. I wanted to talk with Jason about how Jeffries rose through Democratic politics, how he's handled fighting back against Donald Trump during the president's second term, and whether he can unify a party that is still struggling to define its future. This is The Political Scene.

5:40I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. So, in spite of some major headwinds that I'm sure we'll get into later on, The Democrats are currently favored to retake the House in the 2026 midterms, which would likely mean that Hakeem Jeffries would become Speaker of the House after three years of serving as minority leader. Did you get the sense that he's kind of on top of the world at the thought of being Speaker of the House? I think it's something he has been building towards and angling for for for a long time, a lot longer, I think, maybe than people even realized. he is he is not someone who leaves things to chance and i think he is oftentimes thinking you know five or six steps ahead in terms of his own you know his own sort of personal advancement and so i think he's been he's been planning on this for a while um you know he is he is tantalizingly close um and he will be a history making speaker he will be if he does get there he'll be the first black uh black speaker of the house and i think that's important to him so I mean, he's not on top of the world yet, but I think he's getting closer to it.

6:45And I think he can feel that. At the same time, he is obviously aware of all the dynamics within his caucus and the difficulties the Democratic Party faces. I think the job of being a Democratic speaker, Democrats take back the House and him becoming speaker, I think it will be a lot more challenging of a job than the one he currently faces as minority leader. I think it's much easier to lead a party in the minority than it is to lead when you're in the majority. And I think, you know, he's never had to do that before. And I think that, you know, he's going to face some challenges that he maybe isn't even anticipating and he's going to have to adapt.

7:21I think the leadership style that he has adapted to serving as minority leader, I think there are a lot of people in the House Democratic Caucus who don't believe that that style will work when you're a speaker, that he's too light of a touch right now. He doesn't give enough orders. He's deliberative. And I think a lot of people view that deliberateness as being indecisive, and you can't be indecisive if you're a speaker. And I think he's going to have to adjust to that role. Yeah, you mentioned earlier that he has this reputation for being kind of meek. And I guess I'm wondering, is it meek in comparison to someone like Nancy Pelosi or meek in comparison to AOC or like meek in comparison to Trump?

8:01All of those. I think that he, I think following in the footsteps of Pelosi is going to be hard. And I think, you know, in following the footsteps of Nancy Pelosi's second speakership, I mean, I think some of the, you know, we remember Nancy Pelosi, you know, as the speaker from, you know, 2018 to 2022. Nancy Pelosi's first speakership, I think a lot of the criticisms that people make of Jeffrey's today or criticisms that people made of Nancy Pelosi the first time around. But she ruled with an iron fist as the speaker and people in the caucus were afraid to cross her and she was not afraid to slap them down or, you know, remove them from committees or kick them out of leadership.

8:43And these are things that, that Jeffries has not, you know, shown any inclination to do as he hasn't sort of exercised that kind of authority yet. And I think so that that's part of it. Part of it is, you know, he's not, he's not AOC in terms of how outspoken he can be, how, you know, how demonstrative he can be in his opposition to Trump. And I think that is a factor of the role he plays as minority leader. When I was doing the piece, I was excavating his entire career and sort of looking back at some of his earlier days in the House before he joined leadership when he served on the Judiciary Committee.

9:18If you watched some of his performances during Judiciary Committee hearings, the aggressive questioning he did of Republican witnesses, it was very different from the way he acts today. It was more AOC-like than what he's doing today. And I think as party leader, he can't afford to do that. And then when it comes to Trump, I mean, he doesn't deliver an insult the way Donald Trump delivers an insult. I mean, even when he says, fuck Donald Trump, he bleeps it out. And even if he hadn't bleeped it out, it wouldn't come across, it wouldn't land the same way maybe that, you know, if Donald Trump said that about him.

9:52So I think that, and that's just a question of his personality and his ability as a political performer. How has he actually handled the task of fighting back against Donald Trump and the Republicans during the president's second term, like beyond just like the sort of larger social media strategy? Like what has he been doing, you know, within the House? Well, I think in the early days, I mean, he was very much on his back foot and was kind of flailing. I think like basically, you know, every Democrat in the country and every sort of institution in the country, whether it was, you know, universities, whether it was law firms.

10:24I mean, he didn't know what to do during those first few months of Trump's presidency. And I don't really think he found his footing until last summer. And it started with the redistricting battle, which is its own kind of soap opera. But when it became clear that Trump was going to try to engage in this mid-decade redistricting and all these red states ahead of the 26 midterms, Jeffries really sprung into action in terms of trying to counter that and to get blue states to produce gerrymandered maps mid-decade to offset the gains that Trump was seeking in these red states. And that effort is now, it's not as successful as it appeared to be, you know, just as of like three or four weeks ago.

11:14But I still think the way in which Jeffries, He's aggressively kind of confronted Trump there and aggressively went to people in the Democratic Party who for the longest time have been opposed to gerrymandering and basically convinced them to do a 180 on the issue. And he himself did a 180 on the issue and just, you know, engage in this redistricting battle in as sort of just a hypocritical way, frankly, in the way they treated redistricting before and to try to go into these blue states, starting with California and then in a number of others to offset these Republican redistricting efforts. I think that was part of it.

11:53And then soon on the heels of that, there was the shutdown fight last fall when Democrats shut down the government over healthcare, basically. And Jeffries, one, wanted to shut down the government, and two, wanted to make the fight about healthcare, which was a real debate within the caucus. There were some Democrats who wanted the shutdown to be about authoritarianism, it'd be about corruption. And Jeffries, you know, argued and persuaded them that we need to make it just about this one thing, healthcare. And it really proved to be quite successful. You know, when the shutdown was over, most voters blamed Republicans for it rather than Democrats, which was unusual since Democrats were the party that was seen as triggering the shutdown.

12:38And I think he just, he found a way to kind of confront Trump and it worked for him. I mean, it was it was more sort of tactical it was less about social media it was kind of this under the hood kind of stuff which he really likes doing and it actually did work and i think that you know from his point of view and from his supporters point of view they argue that you know you might not like his style and yeah he's not he's not going to sort of be this outspoken guy and he's not going to you know be nancy pelosi standing behind trump during the state of the union tearing up his speech but he can do these things that are actually effective even if they're not as demonstrative and, you know, can actually sort of draw blood through these other kind of just more sort of tactical maneuvers.

13:20And I think that that's what he would argue has been his success as minority leader. You include an anecdote about Jeffries once saying to former Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, you have five families, Kevin. I've got 11. And I'm wondering how Jeffries has approached organizing and rallying the House Dems, which, as Jeffries, you know, was referring to in that quote, has about a dozen subcaucuses and many factions that are increasingly at odds with one another as they're all vying to become the future of the party. Well, I think from Jeffrey's perspective, he would say that he pays attention to all of them, and he seeks their counsel, and he wants to explain his decision-making to all of them, and it's this very collaborative process.

14:03And this is sort of the light touch that people talk about. Um, and that is, you know, why he has been a successful minority leader at this point. I mean, when when Democrats vote, I mean, they tend to vote in a block and you don't see these kind of fissures occurring within the House Democratic caucus that you do within the larger Democratic Party. I think the flip side of that, and this is the argument of people who criticize Jeffries, who are within the Democratic Party, is that he is afraid of offending any one of these groups. And that he is so focused on being speaker that he doesn't want to risk losing the support of any of these different groups.

14:42So he kind of tries to be all things to all people. And he's not willing to do things that would run the risk of angering one of those factions. and that he's purely about member management, which is what one of his House Democratic critics told me. And that, you know, therefore he's a weak leader. He's not leading people anyway in any direction. He's just trying to placate them constantly and please them. And he's not willing to do things that might anger them. You know, in contrast to someone like Pelosi, who was happy to, you know, sort of draw a line and say, you're either doing this or you're no longer with me.

15:18Let's take a quick break. And then when we come back, I want to get into Jeffries' path to Congress and Democratic leadership. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

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16:10So as you mentioned, Jeffries has more or less established a reputation as a kind of like careful and cautious operator who has this light touch. when it comes to navigating thorny political issues. And I'm wondering how early on into his career he kind of developed that reputation and how fully formed he was as a politician at the start. Like, when did he kind of become the man who he is today? So he started his professional career at Paul Weiss, which is this white shoe law firm in New York City. And he was very much a creature of big law, at least professionally. You know, at the same time, he grew up in Crown Heights.

16:51And, you know, as he likes to describe it, you know, he says he grew up in old school Brooklyn, not gentrified Brooklyn. And he was very rooted in the sort of black central Brooklyn community. And when he first ran for office, he ran for a state assembly seat in Brooklyn. And he challenged a 10-term incumbent named Roger Green, who was very much a product of the black Brooklyn establishment. And in order to challenge Green, Jeffries had to run as his outsider. And he wasn't even 30 when he first ran. And he had the backing of Paul Weiss and partners at that firm and Wall Street interests, and he was able to raise money and all.

17:33But that doesn't really take you that far in central Brooklyn. And he lost his first. Yeah, the Paul Weiss voters are not big. I mean, I interviewed Letitia James for the piece because she and Jeffreys are kind of contemporaries and they both came up through Brooklyn politics. And Letitia James was the chief of staff for Green, you know, Jeffreys' first opponent. And she said, you know, something like, you know, white shoe firms don't have a lot of influence in central Brooklyn, which I thought was a pretty good line. And Jeffreys lost that first race by 18 points. He ran against Green again two years later, lost by 24 points.

18:08And then finally, on his third attempt for state assembly, Green had decided to run for Congress. So the seat was open and Jeffries ran in 2006 and was able to win that time. And it was an interesting race because the fundamental issue in that race, the big issue in the Democratic primary was the Atlantic Yards real estate project in downtown Brooklyn where the Barclays Center is now. And it was a big real estate proposal to build a basketball arena and all this housing. And one Democratic candidate was a strong supporter of the project. Another was an implacable opponent. And Jeffries kind of didn't really stake out a strong position either way and sort of for it, sort of against it.

18:50And that like proved to be quite successful. And he was able to win the Democratic primary that way. And, you know, when he was in the state assembly, similarly, you know, he would stake out some strong positions here and there, especially in relation to the Bloomberg administration. Like Jeffrey's signal or signature achievement in the legislature was a bill that stopped the New York City Police Department from keeping information from some of the stop and frisk searches about people they had subjected those to. And he worked very closely with Al Sharpton on that legislation. And, you know, Sharpton said, you know, I was leading the marches and Hakeem was doing the legislating.

19:26And so that was an instance where he kind of took on Bloomberg. But in other instances, he he worked closely with Bloomberg. He was a supporter of charter schools, which is something Bloomberg cared a lot about. So he was like sort of being careful to not not alienate these people who might be able to help him eventually with his, you know, his political rise. And then similarly, when he got to Congress, he was he was just always very strategic and not doing anything that would, you know, sort of inflame people either like positively or negatively, like just trying to kind of take a central path.

19:59How early do you think Jeffries had his sights set on the speakership? There's a really funny anecdote in your piece where there's a Bloomberg advisor who's looking for someone to challenge Bill de Blasio in the 2017 Democratic primary for New York City's mayor. And the advisor makes the mistake of saying that no one who has ever been New York City mayor has been elected to anything after that. And then he tells you, like, after that, it was clear that Jeffries was, like, no longer interested. Yeah. So Jeffries was in his second term when that conversation happened. And so it's interesting that you talk to the people who are in Jeffrey's freshman class in the house, you know, and the house is very much like high school or college.

20:38Like you come in with a group of people and you, those are the people you get to know the best, especially in the early days. Cause you know, you're in orientation together and you're doing all these things together. And at those initial meetings, you can kind of like pick out like, you know, okay, who are the strivers? Who are the people gunning for things? And, um, and none of them pick Jeffrey's. I mean, he just he has a very kind of self-effacing demeanor, very workmanlike. And no one saw him as, you know, a person who had his eyes on on leadership. But, you know, behind the scenes, he was kind of doing the hard work you need to do to make that kind of rise possible.

21:13What do you have to do to make that rise possible? Asking for a friend. Yeah. Well, I mean, you have to sort of do the dark and lonely work and not call attention to it in an obvious way, but make sure that the powers that be know that you're doing that dark and lonely work. So, you know, in Jeffrey's case, he went to Steve Israel, who at the time was the chairman of the DCCC, the House Democrats campaign arm. And he basically said, like, what do you need? Like, I'll do anything you need to help. You know, and that was different, Israel said. you know, a lot of every everybody who's ambitious goes to meet with the DCCC chair because it's a way to kind of raise your profile within the caucus.

21:50And Israel said, you know, a lot of people come in and they say, you know, I want to host all these fundraisers. I want to do all these high profile things. And he said, Jeffries is very different in saying, I'll do whatever you want. So Israel had him do candidate recruitment, which is, you know, very low profile. And then, I mean, literally, I mean, Israel's talked about how, you know, the DCCC would have these Washington fundraisers where you needed House members to show up literally just to serve as warm bodies. And he could always count on Jeffries coming to those things. And people noticed.

22:20The CBC, the Congressional Black Caucus, has been instrumental in Jeffries' rise. And I think for a long time, the CBC was focused on getting Black members to be chairs of important committees or to get a seat at the leadership table. But by the time Jeffries got to Congress in 2013, it was right after Obama's reelection, I think the CBC's kind of vision of the possibilities had grown. And they started to think like we can actually, you know, a black member could be speaker one day. And they started to look around for someone who might be able to do that. And they found Jeffries pretty early on.

22:54And so they helped mentor him and groom him and bring him up through the caucus. And then Nancy Pelosi, who was always looking for members who were kind of willing to do the hard work and not be, you know, not showboat. I mean, that was Jeffrey's exactly. And so she became instrumental in raising his profile and giving him assignments that would, you know, increase his stature. And his first big one was he was made one of the co-chairs of the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. There's so many acronyms. Yeah, the Democratic Policy and Communications Committee. Which is the House Democrats messaging arm.

23:34And Jeffries was able to use that. He basically, he and his two co-chairs went to the 11 families, the different sub-caucuses, and had meetings with each of them, these individual listening sessions where they would ask them, you know, what do you think the Democratic message should be in the 2018 midterms? And Jeffries really used that to introduce himself to the entire caucus. And it was really brilliant on his part because he got to meet all these people. And in meeting with them, he was going to them to ask them for their advice. So they kind of had a favorable view of him. And he was very tactical and very strategic in terms of how he went about courting these Democratic members who would be instrumental in his rise because they ultimately have to vote for people in these leadership positions.

24:19And at the same time, he never had to knife anybody. I mean, never had to really like take anyone out. Partly it was through circumstance, people who would have been his opponents, you know, either lost their reelections like Joe Crowley or had personal scandals like Loretta Sanchez, whose husband was indicted and they kind of fell by the wayside. And then in other instances, people who might have been in his way, Jeffrey's allies were the ones who played the heavies to take them out. Like in this one instance, Jim Clyburn, who was a South Carolina congressman, you know, pretty legendary figure.

24:55he was kind of positioning himself or he was being positioned to serve as a bridge speaker, a bridge party leader. When Pelosi stepped down as party leader, there was this idea that Clyburn, who's about the same age as Pelosi, could replace her for just a term or two to bring along the next generation of leaders. And Gregory Meeks, who's a New York congressman, CBC member, he's probably one of Jeffrey's closest allies on the Hill. Meeks kind of took it upon himself to get Clyburn to drop that idea because Meeks believed that given the Democratic caucus's kind of complicated racial dynamics, if Clyburn were to serve as a bridge speaker, there's no way Hakeem Jeffries as a Black member would succeed him as speaker.