To endorse, or not to endorse, that is the question for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) as New York City and the nation wait to see if this top Democrat will throw his backing behind socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani.
According to Zany Zohran’s backers, this should be a no-brainer. After all, Mamdani won the primary fair and square, but given his far-left proposals like city-owned grocery stores, free buses, and replacing cops with social workers. Jeffries is rightfully wary.
This week, would-be Mayor Mamdani ran away to Uganda to let the heat die down over a guy who once said the state should control the means of production potentially governing Wall Street.
This Africa adventure gives Jeffries a little more time to decide whether to endorse, but not much. The moment is still coming.
What makes this choice so hard for Jeffries is that he knows better than anyone just how dangerous these Democratic Socialists can be. In fact, it’s the whole reason he is now in line for the speakership should Democrats retake the House.
In 2019 Jeffries replaced another New Yorker named Joe Crowley as chair of the Democratic Caucus in the House. The coveted spot in leadership was available because Crowley had suffered a shocking primary defeat at the hands of whom? A bartender named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.
In spite of the fact that AOC opened the door to power for Jeffries, he is actually much more of a Crowley than a Cortez. He might be the poster child for the old-school Democrat machine politician.
Jeffries was born and raised in Brooklyn, state college undergrad, masters in public policy from Georgetown, law degree from NYU, clerked with a federal judge, a decade of private practice, two years in the state assembly and now, Congress. That is how it used to be done.
Now, Hakeem Jeffries’ party is being overrun with theater kids who skirt through college and whose political training comes almost exclusively from far-left activist organizations and Marxist tracts, and they want him to sign off on it.
The political reality for Jeffries is that if he endorses Zohran, then this 33-year-old, who can be credibly called a communist, will be hung like a millstone around the neck of every Democrat running for the House.
Even moderate House Democrats who try to distance themselves from Mamdani and his parade of pathetic and stale socialist programs will be sharply and publicly reminded that the guy they want to make Speaker of the House endorsed a communist.
Nowhere is this more true than close to home in the suburban New York districts that Republicans swept in 2024 to keep their slim House majority. There is no path back to power that doesn’t flow through Long Island and Westchester.
Republican House candidates like incumbents Mike Lawler and Nick LaLota will absolutely make Mamdani a focal point of their campaigns, no matter who their actual opponents are.
There is no easy way out of this predicament for Jeffries. Either he refuses to endorse Mamdani, and sets off an angry civil war in his party, or he does endorse him, and watches Democrats’ chances to win the House and make him speaker diminish greatly.
For any party leader, herding the cats is a great challenge. It was for Nancy Pelosi, and it is for Jeffries. But the Mamdani question is bigger than managing normal ideological differences. Jeffries has to decide if he will, for the first time, usher actual communists into the Democrats’ tent.
Most of us were born at a time when Democrats still proudly called themselves the party of Jefferson and Jackson. Today, it is starting to look more like the party of Marx and Guevara. Can Hakeem Jeffries hit the brakes? Don’t count on it.
My sources in Gotham, in both parties, the ones I trust the most, all think Jeffries will eventually, as quietly as possible, give his support to Mamdani. I’m not completely convinced, but it is the path of least resistance, which is a siren call for most politicians.
When and if Jeffries makes this cowardly choice, Republicans must be prepared to explain, quite clearly, to Americans that one of their major political parties, its oldest, in fact, has come to embrace communism.
For Hakeem Jeffries this is an existential choice, not just for his political future, but the future of his political party, and of our nation itself.