ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — The way Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries sees it, House Democrats haven’t held the majority this Congress — but they’ve governed as if they did.
From avoiding government shutdowns to raising the nation’s debt limit to passing an annual defense authorization bill, “we’ve been required to consistently rise to the occasion,” Jeffries, D-N.Y., told NBC News in an interview during a recent campaign stop here. “Democrats have provided the support necessary, almost overwhelmingly in most instances, in order to get things done.”
Now, he wants the gavel to go with the governing.
Jeffries hopes to win back the House majority with twin messages of “people over politics” and a promise to curb the chaos of the House GOP. If he succeeds, it would bookend the historic Nancy Pelosi speakership (she was the first woman elected to the top job) with another milestone for his party: electing the first Black speaker of the House. But to do that, Democrats will have to flip at least four House seats from red to blue while holding on to some of their most vulnerable districts.
Jeffries, along with other top House Democratic leaders, Katherine Clark of Massachusetts and Pete Aguilar of California, have been racking up miles, crisscrossing the country’s swingiest battleground districts from New York to California.
They include New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District, where freshman Rep. Gabe Vasquez is locked in a rematch against his 2022 rival — a Republican he beat by only 1,350 votes.
Asked to put odds on whether Democrats will flip control, Jeffries repeatedly declined to even give a vibe-check, saying only that “we are working as hard as we can” and reiterating his belief that his party is “right, in terms of our ideas.”
Ultimately, he acknowledged, “these are very evenly divided districts and close races that will come down to a few thousand votes here or there. So it’s important for us to keep our foot on the gas pedal and make sure that we are doing everything possible to communicate the House Democratic vision for making life better for the American people.”
That mindset is carrying Jeffries across the country in the final weeks before Election Day, aiding vulnerable “front-line” members who are playing defense in their districts — from Vasquez in New Mexico to Susan Wild in Pennsylvania — while also boosting members who hope to expand the map in all-important California and New York.
Polling shows the race for House control remains a toss-up — fitting for a chamber that has operated (barely, at times) on a slim majority for the last two years.
Jeffries has learned from the chaotic nature of this Congress — which has been history-making in its erraticness, from a multiday, 17-round vote to elect Kevin McCarthy, R-Calif., as speaker to McCarthy’s ouster less than a year later as punishment for working with Democrats to raise the country’s debt limit.
“Calm is an intentional decision,” Jeffries said when he was asked how he has led his caucus through the tumult. “One can’t control the nature of the extraordinary events that we are being compelled to address over and over and over again, but you can control how you respond.”
Preparing for 2025
If Jeffries had his way, House Democrats would be working with a Kamala Harris administration come January. But it’s also just as possible that Jeffries, as speaker or minority leader, will have to work with a second Trump administration. And while he said House Democrats will strive to work with “traditional Republican colleagues on any issue, whenever and wherever possible,” he sees Trump as different.
“It’s clear to us that Donald Trump intends to try to jam extreme policies, which are spelled out unequivocally in Project 2025, down the throats of the American people. Which is why this election is so incredibly important,” he said.
Before governing can even begin, Congress must certify the election results. What had been a constitutionally mandated, mundane process before Jan. 6, 2021, has become a national inflection point — one that puts the role, and the party affiliation, of the speaker in the spotlight.
“House Democrats are committed to certifying the election based on the results that emerge in terms of who the American people select to be the 47th president of the United States of America,” Jeffries said. But it “remains to be seen whether extreme MAGA Republicans are prepared to certify the election if Kamala Harris is successful. And that’s a very troubling development.”
Asked on NBC’s “Meet the Press” this weekend whether he will certify the election if Trump loses, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., replied with his oft-repeated contingencies: “We are going to do our job in Congress. A free and fair and legal election will be certified. … Yes, if the election is free and fair and legal, and we pray and hope that it is. There’s a lot of work being done to make sure that’s true.”
What Democrats would do
As speaker, Jeffries would be responsible for setting the House’s agenda for the first time in his career. His predecessor, Pelosi, led House Democrats for 20 years both as the minority leader and as speaker. He continues to call her, including in the NBC News interview, “the greatest speaker of all time.”
He’s hopeful he’ll have a President Harris as an ally if he wins the gavel for the next Congress. The two Democrats got to know each other during Harris’ short time in the Senate, collaborating on a bipartisan criminal justice reform law, the First Step Act.
“It was clear that she was emerging as a national leader from the moment that she first arrived,” Jeffries said.
Jeffries outlined Democrats’ priorities as “lowering costs, growing an opportunity economy, being there for working families” and expanding the Child Tax Credit. He declined to detail which bill would be the first introduced in the new Congress, typically reserved for a majority party priority and known as H.R. 1. But he suggested that re-establishing protections for abortion rights would be high on the party’s to-do list.
“We’ll figure out the order of the legislation that will move on the House floor, but it’s fair to say that a top priority closely held by the House Democratic Caucus from across the country is to make sure that we pass, as we’ve done before, the Women’s Health Protection Act in order to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade and reproductive freedom across the land.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
