Hakeem Jeffries built a plan to be speaker – and maybe hold off Trump

(CNN) — Two very different futures await Hakeem Jeffries in January.

In one, the New York Democrat is sitting in the Oval Office with a woman he first met when she was a district attorney and he was a state assemblyman. He’d be a key shepherd for the legislative agenda of Kamala Harris, a peer and a contemporary who, like him, has blended a grounding in liberal Black politics with an emphasis on tilting toward centrism.

In another, Jeffries is sitting there with a fellow New Yorker he once referred to as a “grand wizard” and now says is “a singular, material, adverse change to the trajectory of our country” whom “the racists will have to be asked about why” they support. Facing down Donald Trump, he knows he’d be seen by many as a last bulwark for the Democratic Party – and perhaps for democracy itself.

In either case, Jeffries thinks he will likely be the new speaker of the House – and he has been quietly maneuvering every day since he succeeded Nancy Pelosi as the chamber’s Democratic leader to make that happen, as he detailed in an exclusive interview with CNN during a recent campaign swing in Omaha, Nebraska, very far from his Brooklyn home.

That Jeffries was in Omaha, where Democrats are trying to flip a Republican-held House seat, reflects a reality that many in the party did not expect this late in the cycle. Internal polls and calculations show that earlier hopes of getting to a House majority by picking up seats that Joe Biden would have won in 2020 under the current lines have faded – particularly in California and back home in New York, where many operatives believe the efforts look likely to come up short – while the map has expanded into new territory.

Though senior Democratic operatives involved in the efforts told CNN they believe they will still get the majority, they think it could be by a margin as slim as one seat.

Staring down that reality after this already bizarre election year, Jeffries has traveled more than 25,000 miles, whether sitting alongside New York Rep. Pat Ryan in a yarmulke at a meeting with Orthodox Jewish leaders or attending a voting rights roundtable in the Lehigh Valley with Pennsylvania Rep. Susan Wild or joining a Black small-business roundtable squeezed into a clothing shop in Omaha, where afterward he bought a pair of bright blue-striped socks and told the owner, “I may have to rock these on January 3,” the day he’s hoping to be handed the speaker’s gavel.

The evening before, House Speaker Mike Johnson had promised at a campaign stop in Michigan that, after overseeing one of the least productive sessions of Congress, he would pursue an “aggressive agenda” if Republicans hold the chamber next year and Trump wins.

Jeffries interpreted that as a vow to enact Project 2025, the extensive right-wing agenda written by many former Trump officials and other supporters, which the Democratic leader called “a frightening 922-page document that is a blueprint for extreme MAGA Republican control over the lives and livelihood of the American people.”

But what got him almost sneering was the charge by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan at the same event that if Republicans hadn’t won their slim majority in 2022, “we’d already been living in a completely Marxist country.”

Jeffries pointed to the votes his caucus took to prevent a debt ceiling default and a government shutdown and to save Johnson’s speakership.

“Jim Jordan should be thankful that House Democrats have taken a commonsense approach to governing from the very beginning,” he said.

Jeffries avoids much talk about what he would do as speaker himself – when pressed about what policy needs seemed consistent across all the districts he’s been to, all he offered was the general topic of housing, arguing that it “is no longer just a New York City issue or a San Francisco issue or a Boston issue or Los Angeles issue.” But he avoided any detail beyond just saying, “We have an opportunity for the federal government to do something meaningful.”

In one of his first leadership meetings after taking over two years ago, Jeffries told colleagues that he found two other examples in the past 100 years when House Democrats took the majority back only two years after losing it: 1948, when Harry Truman ran against the “do-nothing” Congress, and 1954, after Republicans followed Joe McCarthy’s lead into going after Americans as communists.

Jeffries has been guided by that. He’s hoping voters see the past two years that way themselves.

A shrunken battlefield for House races

The landscape of competitive House races is smaller than ever, down to about 25 seats that Democrats and Republicans agree truly remain toss-ups. The margins that could decide those races and the future of the House may be smaller than ever too: In 2022, when the majority came down to five seats, Republicans’ combined advantage in the five closest races was all of 6,675 votes.

Anyone who knows anything about Jeffries knows he’s guarded and likes to speak in alliterative, three-part soundbites. He even has a 48-page illustrated book, “The ABCs of Democracy,” coming out a week after Election Day, which repurposes the speech he gave in the middle of the night two years ago after House Republicans, on their 15th ballot, elected a speaker they ended up tossing out nine months later.

Behind Jeffries’ calm exterior, he has taken a deliberately low-key but very forceful hand in candidate recruitment, fundraising, strategy and making sure all his candidates, both in the Capitol and on the trail, stick close to his “Team Normal vs. Team Extreme” formulation to draw a contrast with the GOP.

He has also in just a few months gone from a largely unknown congressman to one of his party’s most prolific fundraisers: House Majority PAC, the leading super PAC backing House Democratic candidates, and its affiliated groups, which have been Jeffries’ main focus, have gone from bringing in $134 million in all of the 2022 election cycle to $314 million by the end of September, according to the group’s figures.

Jeffries did this by opening up new networks of support, such as the Black Economic Alliance members he and Barack Obama met with in New York; making several trips to Chicago to win over lifelong Pelosi friend and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker; and appealing to Rupert Murdoch’s daughter-in-law Kathryn Murdoch.

Some of Jeffries’ success comes from being a fresh face, with union leaders, donors or just semi-involved Democrats excited to sign on with the next generation.

“The biggest applause line I get when I go to districts is, ‘Help us win, because our goal and the uniting force of House Democrats is to make Hakeem Jeffries speaker of the House,’” said California Rep. Pete Aguilar, who is the very collaborative No. 3 on the House Democratic leadership team.

Heading into a fight for the majority immediately after taking over for a legendary leader, in the middle of a dysfunctional Congress and wild presidential campaign, has at times been hard to keep up with for Jeffries and his staff.

But the benefit of the presidential race drawing nearly all the attention and not having millions invested in negative advertising against him for years is that Jeffries has had more freedom to flex into swing districts across the country and elevate races with his national presence. In comparison, Pelosi would often slip in for closed-door fundraisers that the candidates themselves tended to avoid.

Despite relinquishing her leadership post almost two years ago, Pelosi has featured in more Republican attack ads this year than Jeffries, who has appeared in only one, out of Wisconsin.

January 6 looms on the new Congress

As the pro-Trump rioters closed in at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, Jeffries was on the House floor, sizing up how he might have to fight his way out. The new Congress will be sworn in three days before the certification of the 2024 presidential election results, which sits in him like a pit.

Jeffries’ objection to House Republicans is about policy, but also self-respect and competence.

One of his favorite phrases is “bend the knee” to describe people who give in and can’t stand for themselves. That’s how he sees many of his GOP colleagues acting  when it comes to Trump and others on the far right of their caucus.

Jeffries said he’s often asked, “How are you dealing with these extremists on the other side of the aisle?”

“My view is, calm is an intentional decision,” he said. “These are extraordinary events and out-of-control individuals that we often have to deal with in Washington, DC. But that we will continue to make the decision to remain calm so we can process the problem set in front of us in a serious, sober and substantive manner.”

The prospect of working with Harris, particularly on her housing plan, excites him. Jeffries won’t admit it and deflects when asked, but several who have spoken to him told CNN that the possibility of having to work with Trump weighs on him. Though to the Rev. Al Sharpton – who has known Jeffries since he was a white-shoe firm lawyer and would meet with him at the Brooklyn Marriot to talk about working on civil rights cases that he didn’t think were too extreme – “the Bedford-Stuyvesant-Crown Heights side of him would come out” in such interactions

Jeffries, Sharpton told CNN, “is the most goal-oriented person that I’ve met in politics,” always focused on “how do we get there?”

In Omaha, Jeffries started the day with an interview on a hip-hop radio station and then services at Salem Baptist Church, talking about how he wants to restore the child tax credit and put together a real housing plan, in addition to passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. A week before,  in the Antelope Valley outside Los Angeles, Jeffries was at another Black church with House hopeful George Whitesides, who later recalled an older Black woman telling him that she had always voted for Republicans but would be going with the Democrats this year because it meant so much to see the leader showing up there.

In Omaha, Tony Vargas, the Democrat hoping to unseat Republican Rep. Don Bacon, spoke glowingly of Jeffries’ visit and the guidance he has directly gotten from the leader, even though the most specific advice he could name was “Do the work.”

“It felt like, ‘This is real,’” Vargas told CNN as he sat on a bar patio reflecting on the multi-stop day on the trail he had just spent with Jeffries. “From everybody that I’m talking to, the fact that Leader Jeffries is here just coincided with what everybody else already believed.”

Ryan said he had a similar experience bringing Jeffries to his Hudson Valley district in New York, including among Republican elected officials who came to hear him talk about water infrastructure.

“Everybody recognizes that he’s likely to be the next speaker,” Ryan said of Jeffries. “Of all the uncertainty in the moment we’re in, the one thing I’m certain of is that Hakeem Jeffries is going to be speaker.”

The special election that became a model

Even in private, Jeffries listens a lot more than he speaks, but in public – whether it’s in interviews or what he allows colleagues or aides to reveal about him – he is insistently and deliberately boring. This is strategic, Democratic aides say: He wants people to talk about making him speaker because of what it would say about Democrats being in the majority and what they would get done – as if he would not be the one getting the bigger office and, eventually, the oil portrait in the Capitol.

Several involved in the discussions, though, revealed how this played out behind the scenes in a critical February special election on Long Island that in a way became a model for what has come after.

Heading up Interstate 87 in December, Tom Suozzi had Jeffries in his ear. Suozzi had given up his Long Island seat in Congress, only to see his dream of becoming governor of New York end with a crushing defeat to Gov. Kathy Hochul in a bitter primary and then watch Republican George Santos flip his district before being exposed as one of politics’ most creative liars. All Suozzi had to show for the experience was a questionable new beard.

For months, Jeffries checked in with Suozzi and nudged him along as he sought to win back his seat. Back in Washington, Jeffries held off his own members pushing for a vote to expel Santos because he thought the politics would be easier if Republicans had to first produce a bipartisan report detailing the congressman’s lies. Then after the House finally did kick Santos out, the key maneuver: Jeffries helped arrange a last-minute peace meeting at the governor’s mansion so Hochul could tell Suozzi how she thought he should run.

As Suozzi drove to Albany, Jeffries was on the phone coaching his candidate by repeating three words: remorseful, humble, patient. “RHP,” they started joking, like right-hand pitcher Tom Seaver, who they had both grown up watching on the Mets.

“You can be Tom Terrific now,” Jeffries told him.

Suozzi said he could get there on two of the three, but not remorseful.

Hochul finished the meeting feeling sufficiently deferred to. Suozzi felt he held his ground.

The special election ramped up. Local Jewish leaders stuck with Suozzi even though his Republican opponent was a veteran of the Israel Defense Forces. Black clergy in the district rallied around him. National Democrats gave him a pass on ripping them constantly over failing to do more on immigration. Money poured in.

Few saw Jeffries’ hand in each part of it. “This is the way to win the seat, the way to get to the majority,” he would say matter-of-factly, leading the various interest groups to come to their own decisions to back Suozzi.

When Suozzi won, he consulted two people about his first floor speech after being sworn in again: Jeffries and Bill Clinton. Jeffries suggested only a few tweaks, including how the congressman addressed Speaker Johnson in his remarks: “You said something I must gently take exception to. You said, ‘Tom Suozzi ran like a Republican,’” Suozzi said on the floor.

The word “gently” was a Jeffries addition. He thought it would be more of a jab, and a laugh line.

This past week, in between stops for other candidates, Jeffries was checking in on a text chain with Suozzi and a few other New York members about the House seats back home, including the two others on Long Island that Democrats are hoping to win.

“Your incredible campaign set the stage for what’s going on in Long Island and around the country,” Jeffries wrote, one person who read the texts said.

The corny boosterism went both ways, as it often does in conversations with Jeffries.

“Our incredible campaign,” Suozzi wrote back. “The best is yet to come, Mr. Speaker.”

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