New York’s Brad Lander said he would support House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries for speaker if Democrats win back the House — an olive branch from a candidate expected to become one of Congress’ highest-profile progressives.
Lander and several likely members of Congress — including Melat Kiros, Darializa Avila Chevalier, Claire Valdez and Chris Rabb — are part of a group of uber-progressive Democrats, many aligned with the leftist Democratic Socialists of America, who recently won competitive primaries in safe blue districts. The majority of them have not committed to supporting Jeffries if Democrats win in November.
Lander’s support for Jeffries, who is a fellow New Yorker, is a tacit admission that the members are willing to give leadership a chance as they’re on the cusp of winning back the majority — but still he warned that “voters are fed up with the status quo.”
“I look forward to voting for Hakeem to be the speaker of the House,” Lander said in a recent interview with NOTUS. “At the same time, I want a party and party leadership that can listen to the passion and anger that voters feel and be responsive to it, and that means showing people much more clearly than leadership have so far what we’re fighting for.”
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DSA-aligned candidates built their campaigns around a direct challenge to the Democratic Party’s “status quo,” casting themselves as insurgents willing to break with establishment leadership. Their message centered on economic populism — even when that meant taking on moderate Democrats rather than Republicans.
Now that several of them are on track to easily win in November, the tug-of-war over the Democratic caucus’s center of gravity is about to grow even more pronounced. And many of the people who will be trying to pull it left will be from congressional districts in Jeffries’ backyard.
Landers has previously said he plans to support Jeffries for speaker.
“There will be a good opportunity for leadership to create a framework in which we can cut the line as fighters versus folders and show that it will be possible to win the majority in a strong way and to hear what voters are saying about their frustrations and the bolder posture they want to see from Democrats,” Lander, who beat incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in a primary that attracted national attention, told NOTUS.
Lander said Jeffries called to congratulate him and that the two have continued to talk, along with Jeffries’ team, about how Jeffries envisions progressives working in the next Congress.
When asked for comment, Jeffries team pointed to his remarks at a recent press conference.
“I’ve talked to several of them, and we’ll have more to say about it in the future,” Jeffries told reporters when asked about the winners of the competitive primaries in his home state.
Building new working relationships between drastically different wings of the party isn’t an entirely new dynamic for Democratic lawmakers to navigate. In 2019, after Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and Ayanna Pressley arrived as the “Squad,” the then-new lawmakers had to establish a working relationship with then-Speaker Nancy Pelosi.
They often broke with leadership on marquee votes, including when Omar and Tlaib opposed the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure bill, and several backed primary challenges against sitting Democratic incumbents in the years that followed.
Pelosi, who’s retiring, said she has no concerns for Jeffries after November.
“Hakeem is a very unifying force. He’s eloquent. He listens,” Pelosi said in an interview. “He’s very respected by the members. I was a different kind of voice, and I always had a race, except for my first time. Every single time I had a race. I don’t see that for him. I think he will have a very unified caucus.”
Ocasio-Cortez, who told NOTUS she’s made herself a resource for the incoming members, said she understands the candidates have to listen to their constituents who elected them for change.
“Movement-based candidates don’t just make individual calculations. Movement-based candidates generally try to be — especially when they’re elected from their communities — I think they just conference a lot with their communities,” she said.
Some centrist lawmakers, however, are already concerned that the DSA-aligned candidates will use tactics similar to those used by conservatives in the House Republican Conference, whether it be voting down a rule or refusing to back measures supported by moderate Democrats.
Rep. Brad Schneider, chair of the centrist New Democrat Coalition, which has more than 100 Democratic members, argued there should be more attention to the moderate candidates running in battleground races. He argued that candidates like the ones who have beat out incumbents are “not adding to the Democratic majority” because they’re in already-blue districts.
“I am concerned about the rhetoric when [the progressives] come in and they say, ‘We are going to take down the rules, take down the speaker,’ and do these things,” Schneider said. “That just locks it up. We see that with the Republicans.”
While none of the soon-to-be members of Congress have said they plan to vote against Jeffries, they’re noncommittal about supporting him.
Several progressives said the fear expressed by Schneider is disconnected from reality.
“I think if their fear is simply that these will be people who are more interested in division for its own sake or attention for its own sake, they’ve got something else coming,” said Andrew Bard Epstein, who worked on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s campaign and Valdez’s campaign. (Mamdani backed several of the New York progressives on track to win seats in Congress.) “These are people who are smart and determined and strategic.”
Lander was optimistic that in the general election, once primaries are wrapped up, Democrats will come together to win the majority. He dismissed any concerns about members of the caucus being able to work together in that scenario.
“I’m much more worried about Donald Trump and the danger that he presents to the country than I am about the divisions within the party,” he said.
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