Hakeem Jeffries gets the majority of his dreams
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House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) celebrates while watching election night results in Washington last night. Photo: Kenny Holston/The New York Times
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) is set to preside over a commanding Democratic majority after his party swept districts President Trump carried by double digits.
Why it matters: Democrats' landslide win will make it much, much easier for the likely next speaker to secure the gavel without a sweat and ignore the demands of his progressive wing.
- Rep. Greg Stanton (D-Ariz.), a leader of the center-left New Democrat Coalition, told Axios in an interview Tuesday night that Jeffries "now has the space to utilize his full talents as speaker."
- The size of Democrats' victory, Stanton said, "allows him to govern without worrying about being leveraged by anyone."
Driving the news: Jeffries is on track to enjoy a majority of dozens of votes, with the New York Times projecting Democrats to win as many as 256 seats to Republicans' 178.
- Democrats flipped districts where the national parties didn't even spend money, likely unseating Republicans such as Reps. Lauren Boebert and Richard Hudson who were considered safe just months ago.
- It's a major partisan win for Democrats as a whole, but the party's centrist wing is also hailing the result as a much-needed strategic victory over the left.
Zoom in: Progressives — particularly "The Bloc," a group made up of hard-charging leftists like Darializa Avila Chevalier and Adam Hamawy — had hoped to use a small majority to extract concessions from Jeffries.
- Many of them have declined to commit to supporting Jeffries as speaker and signaled they would use their votes as leverage force votes on progressive legislation such as Medicare-for-All, defunding ICE and cutting aid to Israel.
- But the left's strategy is "going to look different from what it would have been with a smaller margin," one incoming House progressive told Axios, noting that "leaders have more flexibility when they have big majorities."
- Progressives "can't really extract much now [with this] colossal majority," a progressive strategist acknowledged, adding that "we don't have to do this high stakes Jeffries fight."
Between the lines: Stanton noted that most of the incoming Democrats who won in purple and red districts were endorsed by the New Dems.
- The center-left group is one of Jeffries' most reliable power bases in the caucus.
- "Every single New Dem incumbent, every single candidate that got our endorsement that's winning tonight — and there's a lot of them — I have full confidence they're going to vote for Hakeem Jeffries as speaker," Stanton said.
Yes, but: Several progressives who spoke to Axios noted that many of the Democrats who won upset victories in deep-red districts on Tuesday ran more as rural and rust belt populists than traditional pro-Israel, pro-business centrists.
- As Axios reported in October, many Democrats who ran in Trump double-digit seats did so with a message that savaged their own party's leadership as much as the GOP's.
- An incoming member of the progressive "Bloc," asked if Democrats big margin would make it harder for the left to get their demands met, replied, "Yes, but only if leadership takes the wrong lessons from tonight."
- "Progressive, populist politics won overwhelmingly and came ridiculously close in places no one expected to see. This kind of margin comes with an expectation that we deliver bold changes," they added.
The bottom line: Progressives are warning Jeffries that he will regret looking at Democrats' massive victory as a green light to govern in increments.
- "I think there's a clear mandate from voters on what sort of progressive economic agenda they want to see," said Usamah Andrabi, a spokesperson for the left-wing Justice Democrats.
