Hakeem Jeffries Is the Kind of Democrat Voters Have Lost Faith In

The homestretch phase of most elections marks the moment when party leaders come together in a show of unity to rally behind a major party’s nominee—a feat that even the Trump-fractured GOP of 2016 managed to pull off. So it was striking that, as The New York Times reported^[3] on Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen’s endorsement of the city’s Democratic mayoral nominee, Zohran Mamdani, the paper of record had canvassed the one prominent Mamdani holdout, House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries, in response. In announcing his own support for Mamdani, Van Hollen called out New York’s “spineless” delegation in Congress that continued withholding its support for Mamdani.

So Jeffries spokesperson Justin Chermol, who no doubt carefully vetted his comments for placement in the Times, chimed in with this: “Leader Hakeem Jeffries will have more to say about the general election well in advance of Nov. 4. Meanwhile, confused New Yorkers are asking themselves the question: Chris Van Who?”

That failed zinger was likely intended to call out Van Hollen’s comments as the handiwork of a mid-Atlantic interloper, but it underscored Jeffries’s ineffectual and aloof leadership style—a major liability for the Democrats as the party prepares for its next battle over a prospective government shutdown at the end of the month. New York Democrats, who are strongly backing Mamdani’s candidacy, aren’t likely to need an introduction to Van Hollen, who’s shown stronger moral leadership than many national Democrats have, by traveling to El Salvador to visit the unjustly detained immigrant Kilmar Armando Ábrego García as he was renditioned^[4] in that country’s brutal maximum-security CECOT prison^[5].

At the time of Van Hollen’s visit, Jeffries publicly praised the senator^[6], though The Bulwark reported that he also told members of his caucus to “slow down” on the “El Salvador stuff,” as one Democratic House member put it—a charge that another of the leader’s spokespeople denied, albeit by denouncing the report as “thinly sourced” rather than inaccurate. In short, Jeffries was then, as on so many other occasions, seeing how the political winds might break prior to committing himself either way. This was an all-too-typical case study after Van Hollen stood before Iowa Democratic activists at the Polk County Steak Fry urging a more decisive and forthright agenda on a party that’s “too cautious, too rudderless, too attached to poll-washed, pundit-rinsed, and donor-dried messages.”

Indeed, Jeffries’s own reaction to the El Salvador visits of Van Hollen and other Democratic lawmakers was the off-topic observation that “Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president in modern American history”—another labored and anemic effort, apparently, to suggest that whole controversy over Ábrego García’s detention fell under the broad category of GOP-engineered “distractions” devised to direct attention away from the second Trump administration’s political failures. That growing litany of phoned-in messaging^[7] from Democratic leaders also bears out Van Hollen’s criticisms of the party, since actions like Ábrego García’s detention—and the pending government bid to deport him to Ghana—are very much the main event for a White House seeking to consolidate its grip on power via Mob-like intimidation and authoritarian spectacle.

Yet this has been the fallback position of Jeffries and his Hill lieutenants throughout the crucial early months of the second Trump term: dismiss or downplay the urgent demands of the party’s base to force open confrontations with the White House’s unpopular strongman agenda, in the talismanic faith that polling and Trump’s own unforced political miscalculations will more or less organically reverse the Democrats’ flailing prospects in time for the 2026 midterms. That’s why, for instance, Jeffries and leading House Democrats opted for a diffident strategy when Trump debuted his federal takeover of law enforcement in Washington, DC, denouncing the emergency justification for the administration’s actions and touting what the leader called a “strongly worded letter^[8]” from the DC attorney general to the White House.

Jeffries rallied to the introduction of the White House’s signature spending-and-immigration-crackdown bill with a marathon speech^[9] denouncing the package from the House floor—the longest such speech in the history of the House. Yet the disastrous measure passed on strict party lines, thanks in no small part to the deaths of three Democratic lawmakers sworn into the 119th Congress in January. The split-screen image of the party’s House leader commanding media coverage during the measure’s floor debate yet lacking the basic numbers to thwart its passage because of the caucus’s blind commitment to gerontocratic rule just about sums up the plight of a risk-averse Democratic caucus dogmatically resistant to new ideas and fresh governing approaches.

The same malady afflicts Democratic leadership’s woeful support for the Gaza genocide—a central factor in the party’s declining popular fortunes, in which Jeffries has played an outsize and indefensible role. Despite his recent pronouncement that the humanitarian crisis in Gaza had reached a “breaking point” under the Trump administration’s watch, Jeffries had voted in favor of legislation to suspend funding for the UN Relief Works for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), on the basis of unproven charges from Israel that agency employees had taken part in the October 7 massacre led by Hamas. As caucus leader, he’s done nothing to advance a bill by Democratic Representative Andre Carson of Indiana to restore funding to UNRWA–let alone the measure cosponsored by Representatives Rashida Tlaib of Michigan and Pamila Jayapal of Washington to embargo American arms shipments to Israel. As Spencer Ackerman writes^[10], “These are material and not rhetorical steps to stop the genocide and save Palestinian lives. The choice is his. The judgment is history’s.”

Indeed, while a caucus leader isn’t primarily charged with managing day-to-day legislative business, Jeffries’s efforts on this front are notably lackluster^[11], particularly in comparison to the track record of his predecessor, California Representative Nancy Pelosi, who navigated the difficulties of directing the caucus^[12] during its periods of minority exile (indeed, the House held majorities for just four of her 16 years as leader). Jeffries is in the unfortunate position of sidestepping direct and galvanizing fights with the White House on key issues such as Gaza, crime, and immigration, while failing to supply desperately needed leadership and direction for a party that is operating without an effective political compass at a key moment of crisis in America’s unraveling democratic experiment. It was no wonder that a plainly exasperated Pelosi implored him, in the heat of last spring’s government spending showdown to “use your power^[13].”

That plea is gaining renewed urgency as Congress gears up for another showdown over spending—and a possible government shutdown—at the end of the month. So far, Jeffries and Schumer are building a strategy that seeks to restore some of the brutal cuts^[14] to the Affordable Care Act enacted in Trump’s spending legislation. While that’s an undeniably worthy goal in and of itself, it’s scarcely commensurate to the scale of the authoritarian putsch now well under way at the behest of the Trump White House and its GOP allies in Congress.

For a party that’s long, and properly, denounced the threat of MAGA Caesarism and the antidemocratic governing agenda of 2025 to count on insurance subsidies to make the affirmative case before the 2026 electorate is roughly akin to assembling a bucket brigade to fend off a tsunami. That’s why Charles Gaba, the leading advocate for the rescue of ACA tax credits, has denounced this as a myopic, weak-sauce strategy^[15]. It’s also why an ideologically diverse set of critics from center-left wonk Josh Marshall^[16] to recovering neocon Jennifer Rubin^[17] are loudly calling for the Democratic leadership on the Hill to seize this moment of leverage to fight back and get meaningful and material concessions from the Republican opposition. So instead of having his staff taking potshots at his critics in the Senate, Jeffries would be far better served by ensuring that the pending spending fight produces a legacy that his caucus members can confidently run on in 2026. If he doesn’t, voters across the country may soon be asking, “Hakeem who?”

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