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By Alex J. Rouhandeh
National Political Correspondent
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After announcing he was stepping down as Speaker of the House in 2015 by singing “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah,” John Boehner, the Ohio Republican, sat down with a handful of reporters in his Capitol Hill office for an exit interview on the eve of his resignation from Congress as a man unburdened. “This is the loneliest place in the world,” he confided to them. Later, out of office, he was blunter, describing to Politico the difficulty of bargaining with President Barack Obama while unable to promise the votes of his own conference: “It’s hard to negotiate when you’re standing there naked.”
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Boehner’s successors have done little to disprove his assessment. Paul Ryan faced the threat of removal by the conservative wing of his caucus before Republicans lost their majority in the 2018 midterms. When the party retook the chamber in 2022, Kevin McCarthy needed 15 ballots to win the gavel in January 2023, only to find himself in the unenviable position of overpromising and underdelivering in the eyes of his most ideological members. To secure their votes, he handed them the keys to his ouster. His speakership lasted just 269 days before eight Republicans joined Democrats to remove, for the first time ever, a speaker by a vote of the House.
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“I knew at the time I probably wouldn’t be able to end the job, I mean, not on my terms,” McCarthy told CBS News afterward. “I never said it’d be fair.”
Watching it all from across the aisle was Democratic leader Hakeem Sekou Jeffries, a Congressman from Brooklyn. During the 15 rounds of roll call votes it took for McCarthy to win the gavel, Jeffries’ name was spoken over 3,000 times on the House floor, while every Democrat voted for their own leader and fragmented Republicans voted for several candidates. After McCarthy’s removal, it took the House GOP three weeks and four nominees to decide on their current speaker, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana.
Should the midterm elections follow forecasters’ projections and give Democrats a House majority, Jeffries is poised to become the first Black American to hold the role of House speaker in the history of the republic.
“We take nothing for granted, but we’re on the verge of taking back control of the House of Representatives,” he told reporters during an October campaign event in Pennsylvania. However, making history may not be enough to head off the kinds of intra-party frictions with his own party’s ideological extremes that his Republican predecessors have faced.
“A Black face in a high place is still very limited in a corrupt system, but I still acknowledge it as a blow against white supremacy, and that’s always a beautiful thing,” Cornel West—the famed philosopher of morality and African American critical thought who was a Democratic Socialists of America leader during its 1982 founding—told Newsweek. “But Blackness should never serve as an excuse to downplay one’s own moral and political convictions.”
The Republican wave of 2010 handed Boehner 242 seats and 87 freshmen, many of them carried into office by a Tea Party movement that regarded its own party’s leadership with nearly as much suspicion as its bogeyman Obama. The energy came from outside Washington: rallies, talk radio, insurgent primary challengers who ran against “the establishment” as much as they did against Democrats. By 2015, the most committed members had organized themselves into the House Freedom Caucus, roughly 40 strong and, crucially, large enough to be pivotal in any Republican speaker race.
The Democratic majority now taking shape has a familiar look. Its energy, too, is coming from outside the Beltway: from DSA organizers, whose movement elected Zohran Mamdani mayor of New York City, and from voters, in both red and purple districts, whose anger at President Donald Trump is matched by their impatience with the leaders of their own party and their desire to topple the status quo.
“Having unity doesn’t mean being unanimous,” Representative Jim Clyburn, Jeffries’ mentor who served as the third-ranking House Democrat for 16 years, told Newsweek. “If everybody agreed all the time, there is no opportunity for growth.”
As with his recent Republican predecessors, Speaker Jeffries will be tasked with managing his caucus’s most fractious members. Some of his allies dismiss the insurgency as a phenomenon confined to the bluest parts of America. But few Democrats in Washington know the shape of this dynamic better than Jeffries, because he has been navigating it in his home district of Brooklyn for over a quarter of a century.
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The bitterness of their 2024 loss of the White House, Senate and House changed the Democratic Party, ushering in a new generation of political participants who are more populist and more grassroots than the generation before them—the generation, as it happens, to which Jeffries belongs.
Democrats lead the generic congressional ballot by more than 8 points in the RealClearPolling average, but Jeffries carries a negative 10-point favorability rating according to a polling aggregate compiled by RealClear Polling. That puts him 12 points above his fellow Brooklynite in the Senate, Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, who’s underwater by 22 points. Both men, as stewards of their respective Congressional caucuses, have come to symbolize wider discontent with the Democratic Party itself, which carries a negative 15-point favorability rating.
“It’s very apparent that while the country is fully enveloped in a populist moment, the political class is still stuck looking at things in an outdated right-left spectrum,” Mike Madrid, a longtime political strategist and Lincoln Project cofounder, told Newsweek. “They can say they’re just DSA candidates winning in DSA areas, but two years ago, we were saying the same thing about MAGA candidates. This has nothing to do with ideology—it’s absolutely populist, and it’s not just your typical 1990s antigovernment, anti-establishment, anti-incumbent sentiment. This is about a system. People want systemic reform.”
The Measure of a Majority
The size of Jeffries’ majority is the variable that matters most. Given the sheer size of the Republican wave in 2010, the Tea Party freshmen could lay a strong claim on the majority’s mandate. But the Freedom Caucus never needed to be large, it only needed to be larger than the speaker’s margin.
In the current House, Republicans count 219 seats to the Democrats’ 214, which means the Democrats need a net gain of just three seats to take control. The Cook Political Report said on October 23 that “we view the likeliest outcome as Democrats flipping between 12 and 22 seats,” which would give Democrats a majority between 19 and 39 seats.
The difference between the low and high ends of that range is two entirely different kinds of speakerships. In a 19-seat majority, Jeffries would have just nine votes to spare on a party-line vote, the same kind of slim margin that faced recent Republican speakers, requiring near unanimity to advance legislation. If Democrats end up with a majority of 39 seats or more, however, any individual bloc would wield less influence because Speaker Jeffries would have more votes to spare.
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There are currently just two DSA members in the House, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York (who, in some ways, Jeffries will owe his speakership; more on that below) and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, who have banded together with five other progressive members, including Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, as “The Squad.”
According to an analysis by the Brookings Institution, there are 18 other Democratic House candidates running this year who were endorsed or recommended by the DSA. They won primaries across the country, including Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City, Chris Rabb in Pennsylvania, Donavan McKinney in Michigan, Melat Kiros in Colorado and nine other DSA-backed candidates in California.
By Newsweek’s count, 13 of these are highly likely to win in the general, which would result in a DSA-aligned bloc of 20 members in the next Congress—right at the low end of estimates of the Democratic majority, and giving them sway in party-line votes.
After DSA candidates won primaries in New York this past June, Jeffries struck a welcoming note, writing on X, “From public servants to union organizers to community activists, the path is different but the work is the same.” But he still kept some distance, telling Meet the Press in August, “I don’t support the DSA agenda.” He added, “Now, you’re going to have individual members who have been elected in Democratic primaries and, if they are elected in the general in November, will be part of the House Democratic Caucus. It’s going to be a broad caucus.”
On that last point, Jeffries is likely to be proven correct. The members poised to deliver his majority are not all insurgents. Jeffries has stumped for Democrats across the country: In Pennsylvania, he campaigned with Bob Harvie, Bob Brooks and Janelle Stelson—all three running in marquee swing districts. In Texas, he campaigned for challenger Johnny Garcia, who is running in a district redrawn to lean redder. And in California’s conservative 13th District, he campaigned alongside Representative Adam Gray, whip for the conservative Democratic Blue Dog Coalition and chair of its affiliate PAC.
“He’s not trying to force ideological purity but rather embrace a big tent Democratic Party that could potentially govern for a long time,” Gray told Newsweek.
Big tents, though, are prone to having holes. On two occasions in recent months, Blue Dog Representatives Marie Gluesenkamp Perez of Washington and Jared Golden of Maine gave Republicans the margin necessary to advance a rule vote (a typical no-no for the opposing party, as rules to advance legislation typically pass on party lines). The first time it happened, Jeffries said a “serious response” would follow. But the second time, he punted. “Voting in the interest of their district is kind of a bright red line for me, but again, I think it’s a strength,” Gray said. “I think it’s the strength of Jeffries.”
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King of Consensus
Jeffries’ record as minority leader is the strongest argument for his ability to hold it together. Newsweek spoke to over two dozen people who have watched Jeffries across his political career in both New York and federal politics to assess the presumptive speaker’s strengths and weaknesses.
His tenure as minority leader has seen the passage of the most discharge petitions since the New Deal era, forcing votes to release the Epstein files and to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies, and he has presided over record cash hauls at House Majority PAC and House Majority Forward, the two main House Democratic outside fundraising groups. By all measures, Jeffries has done what’s required of his position—keep Democrats united, counter GOP legislative efforts when he can and fill the party’s coffers.
“He believes that he can work with anybody, but he believes that no individual or no individual group’s politics can overwhelm the unity of the caucus,” Jaime Harrison, the former Democratic National Committee chair who once ran floor operations for Clyburn, told Newsweek. “So, he’s going to be pushing folks, not only DSA members, but also the conservative Dems and other various factions, to understand that none of the things that you are fighting for will happen, but for the majority.”
Drew Hammill, who spent more than 15 years working for former Speaker Nancy Pelosi and rose to deputy chief of staff, credits Jeffries with mastering the least visible part of the job.
“As Democratic leader, he has done an excellent job in not only making the decisions, the hard decisions, that need to be made behind the scenes to, you know, corral people, but getting consensus, and that requires a lot of work,” Hammill told Newsweek. “It requires checking with a lot of people and getting everybody on the same page. It’s the part of the job that doesn’t get attention, that is not very glamorous but is the very hard work.”
He is less sanguine about how the consensus pitch will land with the left flank. “The nature of the left is to be inherently discontent,” Hammill said. “That’s a dynamic that you always have.”
That’s certainly been the case in Jeffries’ district, New York’s 8th, which covers a broad swath of Brooklyn.
It’s the Brooklyn Way
Jeffries began his career in politics not as an insider but as a clear outsider. Born in 1970, Jeffries was raised in Crown Heights, a historic neighborhood that, alongside adjacent Bedford-Stuyvesant, was home to Weeksville, which in the 1830s was one of America’s largest communities of free Black people. While parts of the area later became mostly white, that community departed following World War II, and by the 1970s both neighborhoods were more than 70 percent Black. The area produced prominent political and cultural leaders from Shirley Chisholm—the first Black woman elected to Congress—to Jackie Robinson and the Notorious B.I.G.
Jeffries was raised middle class. Both his parents attended college and belonged to unions. His mother, Laneda, was a social worker and his father, Marland, was a state substance-abuse counselor. They raised Hakeem and his brother Hasan in Brooklyn’s historic Cornerstone Baptist Church, an institution that’s been led by some of America’s foremost civil rights leaders.
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“Faith is an integral part of his daily life,” Reverend Lawrence E. Aker III, the senior pastor for Cornerstone who’s known Jeffries for over 30 years, told Newsweek. “The church is part and parcel of his development, of his maturation as a leader. He started speaking in the church, giving addresses. The foundation for his public speaking was at Cornerstone.”
After attending Binghamton University for college, Jeffries went on to earn a master’s in public policy from Georgetown University and a law degree from New York University, where he served on the law review, then worked as an associate at the white-shoe law firm Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison.
But he soon turned to public service. Just three years after graduating law school, Jeffries challenged New York State Assemblyman Roger L. Green in the 2000 Democratic primary. Green was a major fixture within Brooklyn’s organizing and civil rights communities, leading nonprofits that supported professional development for young people. He was very much a grassroots figure, and after years in office, he was a stalwart of Brooklyn’s political machine. Jeffries offered voters a competing vision of a politician.
“[Green came from a generation] where a lot of leaders saw progress through their political activism or community-level activism or even church-based organizing, which opened the door for people of my and Jeffries’ generation to have success in other areas,” Basil Smikle, the former executive director of the New York Democratic Party and director of the nonprofit management program at Columbia University, told Newsweek. “At the time, and I don’t know that this has really gone away, there was an uneasiness around the transfer of power from the older Black leaders to younger ones.”
In Jeffries’ first bid for office, Green won handily, taking 59 percent of the vote to Jeffries’ 41 percent. However, that shellacking didn’t stop Jeffries from running again. In 2002, he once again challenged Green but lost 62 percent to 38 percent. After that race, district lines were redrawn in a manner that placed his home a block outside, preventing him from running there again. “Brooklyn politics can be pretty rough, but that move was gangster,” Jeffries later said in the 2010 documentary Gerrymandering. However, Green left the seat in a failed bid for Congress in 2006 and Jeffries sold his home and moved back into the district, ultimately winning the seat that cycle.
Despite being a young assemblyman, Jeffries broke with his party to back Obama over Hillary Clinton, who was New York’s senator at the time. That did not stop Jeffries from being a productive member of the state assembly, as his bills to stop police from compiling data obtained via stop-and-frisk and to stop the counting of incarcerated people upstate as residents of those areas became law.
Six years later, Jeffries ran for Congress against City Council Member Charles Barron, who came from an organizing background and had the endorsement of outgoing Representative Edolphus Towns. This time, Jeffries had the backing of Brooklyn party boss Vito Lopez.
“The areas that Hakeem represented were different and had gentrified significantly, and my guess is that [they] gentrified a lot faster than Barron’s areas,” Smikle said. “So, that had an impact.”
An Outsider, Not a Revolutionary
Despite having once been a member of the progressive caucus, Jeffries never campaigned on a populist message. “Brooklyn has a long-standing kind of Black activist electoral politics, but Jeffries wasn’t necessarily representative of that,” said Christina Greer, a Fordham University political scientist whose work often focuses on New York City.
Greer said he was seen as someone who could be an alternative to the political machine and someone who could work with the more conservative Jewish and Eastern European residents in the southern portion of the district.
In Washington, members of the Congressional Black Caucus selected him as their whip in November of 2014. In that role, he led the caucus in a “hands up, don’t shoot” demonstration on the House floor following the police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri.
Jeffries’ rise was quick, and the decisive opening came from the same insurgent left that now dogs him. In 2018, a progressive insurgency saw Ocasio-Cortez knock off Representative Joe Crowley of Queens, who in his 10 terms in the House had become the fourth-highest ranking Democrat as the chair of the Democratic Caucus. His defeat created an opening in the party leadership that Jeffries pursued, and in a 123-113 vote, he beat progressive California Congresswoman Barbara Lee for the position.
“When Joe Crowley was defeated by AOC, that presented an opportunity,” Clyburn said. “I suspect that most people on the Hill at the time thought that Joe Crowley was on track to ascend to the speakership, but that loss left an opening that Hakeem Jeffries was well prepared to step into.”
The election of Donald Trump in 2016 had created an appetite for bareknuckle, populist pushback from progressives. In the 2018 midterms, which netted Democrats 40 seats, Jeffries—as a co-chair of the House Democratic Policy and Communications Committee—helped craft a winning message that was tailored more for suburban moms than issues-based urban activists.
“The difference between House members that take on the responsibility of leadership and those that don’t is usually a focus on winning instead of on specific issues,” Jesse Ferguson, a longtime Democratic strategist who’s worked in House politics, told Newsweek. “Leadership are willing to make the first and foremost priority about winning the majority and put everything else secondary to that.”
It’s the language of activists, however, that launched the people-powered campaign of Ocasio-Cortez and boosted the DSA chapter in New York. At the start of 2020, New York City’s DSA chapter had under 4,100 members. Today, that membership stands at over 15,000. And in 2025, the DSA achieved its greatest victory to date, sending one of its own members to the mayoralty of New York City with the election of Mamdani.
In those victories, the DSA and its legions of volunteers emerged as a force in New York City politics once filled by the old political machines to turn out votes in Democratic primaries. “Through self-indulgence, neglect and laziness, the Democratic Party left a wide opening for the DSA—which is offering a credible critique, a clear vision on housing, health care, fascism, Israel—and the actual willingness to knock doors and put in the work—to occupy the space the Democrats vacated,” Amit Bagga, a recent DSA member and Democratic strategist who’s served both Mamdani and the establishment-aligned administration of New York Governor Kathy Hochul, told Newsweek.
In Jeffries’ own district, the voters with whom he staked his original appeal have grown older and some have moved away. In turn, a new crop of younger, whiter, highly educated voters has moved into the area. These folks are part of the Mamdani base. They’re also a coalition that Jeffries’ political operation has labeled “Team Gentrification.”
“If Team Gentrification wants a primary fight, our response will be forceful and unrelenting,” André Richardson, a senior Jeffries adviser, told CNN in July 2025.
“Hakeem Jeffries only cares about keeping the corporate donations rolling in,” Grace Mausser, co-chair of NYC-DSA, said in a statement to Newsweek. “He and his staffers can sling insults all they want, but we’re serious about helping working-class families live and thrive in Brooklyn, and people can tell who’s actually on their side.”
The Mamdani Surge
Tensions between that faction and Jeffries, already strained over his stance on Israel, became more overt following the ascent of Mamdani. The mayor won the Democratic nomination in June 2025 over former Governor Andrew Cuomo, who revived his campaign to run against Mamdani in the general election. Jeffries did not endorse Mamdani until October 24, 2025, the day before early voting began. To some New Yorkers, this was a sign that Jeffries was indeed an opponent of Mamdani’s movement, so they moved to act accordingly.
Following Mamdani’s election, City Council Member Chi Ossé, a recently joined DSA member representing the Crown Heights neighborhood, filed paperwork to challenge Jeffries in the following year’s primary. Jeffries’ response was a dare: “Come on in. The water is warm,” he told reporters.
At the urging of Mamdani, who said publicly he wanted Jeffries as speaker, the DSA’s citywide electoral working group voted 626 to 555 against endorsing Ossé’s candidacy, and he dropped his bid weeks later. “I think that there’s a real chance that [Ossé] would have caught Hakeem flat-footed, and he would be the representative of that district,” Greer said. Ossé declined an interview request.
Jeffries avoided a fight on his own turf, but his allies did not. In the June 23 primary, Representative Dan Goldman, whom Jeffries endorsed, lost by more than 30 points to former city comptroller Brad Lander, who had the backing of Mamdani and Senator Bernie Sanders.
In upper Manhattan, Representative Adriano Espaillat, another Jeffries-backed incumbent, lost to DSA-endorsed Avila Chevalier, 49 percent to 46 percent.
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In the open race to succeed retiring Representative Nydia Velázquez, in which Jeffries remained neutral, DSA’s Valdez beat Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso by more than 20 points. The day after, Jeffries said he and the mayor “agree to strongly disagree about some of his endorsements,” and warned that Mamdani has “got work to do in terms of the conversations that he’s going to have with members of Congress moving forward.”
The same fault line has split the Brooklyn Democratic Party, the machine Jeffries once ran against and eventually came to dominate. In June, a reform slate organized by the New Kings Democrats—a grassroots reform coalition led by Brooklyn Democratic Party member Tony Melone—won a majority of the county’s district leader seats, threatening the party’s chair, Rodneyse Bichotte Hermelyn, a former Jeffries ally.
In August, Bichotte Hermelyn pushed through rule changes that would have effectively kept herself in power. Jeffries, through a spokesman, said he did “not support it.” Multiple Brooklyn Democratic leaders told Newsweek that if Jeffries had wanted her out, it would’ve happened, and that keeping her in place had long been more convenient than an anti-establishment alternative.
NYC-DSA’s Mausser put it more bluntly. “If Jeffries wants to be speaker, he should show that he’s capable of organizing in Congress to stand up to Donald Trump,” she said. “But as we’ve seen with the power grab in the Brooklyn Democrats, he’s not even capable of stopping his own allies in his own backyard.”
Courts threw out the new rules in September; Bichotte Hermelyn announced she would step down and backed Assemblymember Nikki Lucas, who first won office with Jeffries’ support. Lucas claimed the chair in an October vote that the reformers are challenging in court.
Bichotte Hermelyn framed the fight in racial terms. “There is some racial undertone to that because the New Kings Democrat is being led by white men,” she told NY1, even though a majority of the insurgent slate are people of color.
It is a version of an argument old-line Democrats across the city now deploy against the left: that the challengers are young, affluent, mostly white newcomers usurping Black and Latino institutions they did not build.
When a DSA candidate challenged Brooklyn Assemblymember Stefani Zinerman in 2024, her spokesperson accused him of “district shopping for the interlopers and gentrifiers who know nothing about the history and culture” of the neighborhood. After Espaillat’s loss, a Democratic operative complained to the New York Post that the DSA was “using the forces of gentrification” in Harlem.
The left calls the framing cynical, and Black DSA members say it erases them. Smikle offers a different reading. “The activism you’re seeing now is not that different thematically and ideologically from what has historically occurred in Black communities,” he said.
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Winning the Gavel
That argument does not stop at the Brooklyn Bridge. As speaker, Jeffries will be both the leader whom insurgents target and a historic figure whose defenders will frame opposition to him in racial terms. Confronting Jeffries, and by extension the Congressional Black Caucus—which has pledged its support—would put any insurgent Democrat in the relationship-driven institution of Congress in a very uncomfortable situation.
“I think some of these folks have to be very aware of what their dissent says to the Black community,” former DNC chair Harrison said. “I don’t think it would be a good look for those in the party to say, this man who’s done all these things, checked all these boxes, hasn’t earned the opportunity.”
West, who’s not currently engaged with the DSA, acknowledges the group would face serious optics challenges if it were to mount heavy-handed opposition to Jeffries. “[The DSA] has always been much, much more vanilla than chocolate,” he said. “The DSA folk have not really put white supremacy at the center of their agenda.”
It remains an open question whether Jeffries can bridge that divide. Despite the many statements attesting to his practice of communicating with all voices in Congress, multiple sources stated he does not have a direct line of communication with the New York City DSA. Jeffries declined to be interviewed through a representative and did not provide direct responses to a list of questions.
Antjuan Seawright, a Democratic strategist and protégé of Clyburn, told Newsweek, “I don’t think he has to take a my-way-or-the-highway approach in terms of how he responds. I don’t think, in fact I know that Jeffries does not mind constructive criticism, but I think it gets hard pressed to have constructive criticism from people who have not constructed anything.”
A fractious coalition seldom accomplishes great feats in the House of Representatives, as Boehner, Ryan and McCarthy each learned. For those who campaigned on realizing great change, they may find that Jeffries’ skills as a consensus builder meet the moment more adequately than they thought on the campaign trail.
As the first Black speaker tasked with taking up the gavel in the age of Trump 2.0, Jeffries will face mounting pressure to prove his accomplishments can be as historic as his ascent. If he delivers, he could prove current leadership has what it takes, and he could demonstrate that voters want pragmatism, not revolution.
If he comes up short, an anti-establishment uprising and a Democratic primary challenger could be waiting at his Brooklyn doorstep, and the speaker’s office will be as lonely for him as it was for the men before him.
Illustration by Tim O’Brien for Newsweek
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