Representative Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland, the longest serving House Democrat who for decades was one of his party’s top leaders, will not seek re-election and plans to retire when his term ends in early 2027, according to a person familiar with his plans.
Mr. Hoyer, 86, is expected to announce his plans in a speech on the House floor on Thursday morning. His retirement after 23 terms, which has been widely anticipated among his colleagues since former Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced her own, was reported earlier by The Washington Post.
It lands at a moment when the Democratic Party is in the middle of a raging debate about the need for generational change in its ranks at a crossroads moment for the country.
Mr. Hoyer, an ambitious leader and a onetime political rival to Ms. Pelosi who ultimately became her second-in-command, worked for much of his career in her shadow. In 2022, after Democrats lost control of the House, he waited for Ms. Pelosi to announce that she would step down from leadership before putting out a statement saying that he would do so.
In November, Ms. Pelosi announced her plans to retire after a history-making 39 years in Congress. Since then, many House Democrats have assumed that Mr. Hoyer would follow her lead.
When Mr. Hoyer stepped down from leadership in 2022 to help make way for a new generation of Democrats, he said that any ancient rivalry with Ms. Pelosi had been tempered over the years by his deep respect for her.
“I think Nancy is the best speaker we’ve had, so I was the No. 2,” Mr. Hoyer said in an interview with The New York Times that year. “But I was the No. 2 to someone who people think is, in history, one of the five top speakers who we’ve had. What am I going to offer?”
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A moderate in a party that has often been dominated by progressives, Mr. Hoyer’s legacy after nearly a half-century of service in Congress includes leading the charge in the House to enact the Americans with Disabilities Act and writing the Help America Vote Act, a measure to clean up federal elections that became law in 2002.
In recent years, the silver-haired Mr. Hoyer increasingly appeared to be something of a throwback to a lost era of less polarized politics on Capitol Hill. He was one of the few Democrats left in Congress who maintained decent relationships with some of his Republican colleagues, including former Speaker Kevin McCarthy and former Senator Roy Blunt of Missouri, even after the party had transformed itself under President Trump.
Mr. Hoyer has described himself as a happy warrior and has embraced the change afoot in his own caucus, including the growing diversity in his party’s ranks that has made older white men like him look like a vanishing breed.
But he has at times also appeared out of step with the direction in which the Democratic Party is headed.
Mr. Hoyer, for instance, has long been opposed to banning members of Congress from trading individual stocks, a populist proposal that an overwhelming majority of voters in both parties support. The Democratic Party’s new leaders in the House have said that they enthusiastically back a ban.
And he has long acted as the unofficial leader of the annual junket that first-term lawmakers take with AIPAC, the hard-line pro-Israel lobbying organization, to visit Israel.
“What we found is that contrary to world opinion, Israel has been doing everything it possibly can to ensure that there’s minimal damage to civilians who are not part of Hamas’s army,” Mr. Hoyer said in a video he recorded for AIPAC during the trip last August.
That message was viewed as out of step with a realignment underway in Congress on Israel, in which Democratic lawmakers have turned away from a decades-old bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill around offering unconditional support for the Jewish state.
Annie Karni is a congressional correspondent for The Times.
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