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

Hakeem Jeffries thinks he will likely be the new House speaker – and he has been quietly maneuvering every day since he succeeded Nancy Pelosi to make that happen.

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.