Back in May, Representative Hakeem Jeffries, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, saw a crucial piece of his strategy for winning control of the House slipping away.
Republicans, spurred on by President Trump, had redrawn congressional districts in Florida to favor themselves, and Representative Jared Moskowitz, a centrist Democrat from Coral Springs, was thinking of quitting rather than fighting for a third term in a far more conservative district.
Death threats were already jamming up his voice mail, and Mr. Moskowitz was frightened of what would happen to his family as Republicans trained their attacks on him.
Mr. Jeffries would not hear of it. In calls and meetings, he leaned hard on Mr. Moskowitz to stay in the race, telling him he was the key to a play to hold on to all four Democratic districts that Republicans in the state had carved up to protect the G.O.P. majority.
“You’re the only one who can win that seat,” Mr. Jeffries told him, promising to match the torrent of Republican money that would be spent against him. “You’re the linchpin for the other three.”
On Tuesday, the plan worked. Mr. Moskowitz won one of the most expensive races in the country, and the three other Florida Democrats who were under threat held on or were ahead in ballot counting.
“It was Jeffries who got me comfortable to have me do this,” Mr. Moskowitz said in an interview on Wednesday.
It was part of a broader blueprint Mr. Jeffries pursued relentlessly over the past year that positioned Democrats to win control of the House and set himself up to make history as the first Black speaker with no anticipated challenge to his leadership.
“Speaker Hakeem Jeffries,” Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to serve as speaker, crowed in a social media post as the victories piled up on Tuesday night and the scope of Democrats’ sweep — on track to be the biggest House majority in a generation — became clear.
But not all Democrats cheered Mr. Jeffries’s impending elevation.
Stop “killing the vibe,” some posters barked back at Ms. Pelosi.
A petition encouraging House Democrats to “choose a new speaker” began gaining traction online. (The call to action, which has drawn more than one million signatures, was started by a social media creator who gets paid to publish petitions, and can earn more based on how many people sign.)
Progressives fed up with the Democratic Party establishment see the leader, a reserved moderate and prodigious fund-raiser, as an avatar of the status quo who is beholden to corporate interests.
Many who want the United States to stop supporting Israel view Mr. Jeffries, a longtime backer of the Jewish state, as too closely aligned with AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobbying group. And several Democrats elected last week have said they do not support him.
In an interview on Wednesday, operating on 90 minutes of sleep, he shrugged off the resistance to him. “Our track record of success, decisiveness and a historic victory over MAGA extremism speaks for itself,” he said. “There’s nothing else for anybody to say when it comes to what this House Democratic leadership team has been able to accomplish.”
A Deliberative Leader
Despite the skepticism, Mr. Jeffries is expected to be nominated overwhelmingly by Democrats this month as their choice for speaker, a rarity in the House where party leaders often ascend through tumultuous challenges, and to be elected in January.
Mr. Jeffries has kept House Democrats largely united against Mr. Trump’s agenda through the first two years of his second term and emerged as a fund-raising power house, raking in a combined $826.8 million in the midterm election cycle, according to figures provided by his team that have not been previously reported. (By comparison, Speaker Mike Johnson, a Louisiana Republican, raised $526 million over the same period.)
Still, his cautious and deliberative style has led some critics in his ranks to wonder privately whether he has the temperament to lead his party at a time when many voters, especially progressives, are eager for them to act loudly and boldly with their new power.
Representative Greg Casar of Texas, the chairman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, said he expected to support Mr. Jeffries and had worked well with him in the past. But he remained concerned that Democrats, once they take power, would be seen as complacent.
“We have to show people what we’re for when Trump doesn’t matter anymore,” he said. “We’re seen as a party of nervous lawyers who tinker around the edges.”
Mr. Jeffries, a former civil litigator, likes to host listening sessions and have a caucus “family discussion” before telegraphing his position on any issue. In the interview, he would not say whether he supported cutting off aid to Israel, after Mr. Trump announced a day earlier that he would end $4 billion in aid.
“I haven’t seen that announcement,” he said. “We’ll have that conversation as a caucus.”
Nor would he say whether Representative Haley Stevens, the Michigan Democrat who endorsed the Republican Senate candidate in her state, should be punished.
“It’s a conversation that I expect the committee on caucus rules will take up,” he said.
Representative Gregory W. Meeks, Democrat of New York, said that people should expect to see Mr. Jeffries operate more assertively once he assumes the top job.
“When you’re the speaker, you become the engine of the vote,” he said. “Hakeem is ready to do just that. In the minority, your role is not as commanding.”
But few who know him well expect his approach to change. Mr. Jeffries, whose public speeches often lean heavily on hip-hop references and alliterative flourishes, does not chase viral moments and is not interested in “excelling on the algorithms.”
In defending his style, he sometimes invokes civil rights leaders who talked about the difference between a moment and a movement.
“True freedom fighters involve themselves in the movement, and they’re not in it just for a moment,” he has told people.
Determined Rise in Brooklyn
His ascent to become the most powerful man in Congress had a little bit to do with luck — the other potential successors to Ms. Pelosi all ran for Senate or lost their re-election campaigns. But throughout his life, Mr. Jeffries has been viewed as a potential leader.
And as a Black man raised in Brooklyn, who worked in Big Law and then struggled to break into New York City politics, he developed a highly disciplined style.
“It’s just who he is and always has been,” said Lupe Todd-Medina, a longtime adviser. “He was also a civil litigator — he was in a world and career where you had to choose your words carefully.”
Mr. Jeffries grew up in a working-class home in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn in the 1980s, when the now-gentrified neighborhood was a hotbed of Black activism but also faced persistent crime and unrest associated with the crack cocaine epidemic.
His mother and his aunt joined the Cornerstone Baptist Church in the 1960s, and the congregation and its pastors became an important force in shaping Mr. Jeffries’s early life. His grandmother thought he would become a preacher.
“I’ve seen him rise in the ministry as a speaker for different programs,” said the Rev. Dr. Lawrence E. Aker II. “That’s where he’s honed a lot of his skills.”
Mr. Jeffries and his brother were pushed to excel above all else. He was elected president of the historically Black Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity at the State University at Binghamton.
He has said that he was motivated to go to law school to join the struggle for racial justice. Fighting against police brutality has been a through-line of his career.
After law school and his brief stint as a litigator, Mr. Jeffries decided to run for office for the first time at the age of 29, taking on an incumbent in the State Assembly backed by the Brooklyn Democratic machine. He lost but drew some 40 percent of the vote, enough to scare the establishment.
By the next time he ran, the Legislature had redrawn the district lines to cut him out. In 2005, on his third run, Mr. Jeffries packed up his family, including two children under the age of 6, and moved them out of an apartment he owned in a building with an elevator and a doorman to a four-story walk-up rental two blocks away.
He won his first election in 2006. Many people around him assumed it was the first step in a long career.
“We didn’t start talking about Congress until he got into the Assembly,” said Ms. Todd-Medina. “We never had that conversation about him becoming speaker. But was I always thinking it? Yeah.”
It is a political origin story that resonated when Mr. Trump and Republicans began their redistricting push last year.
“It was a visceral reaction that I had to the effort to try and rig the midterm elections, because it’s something I’ve experienced throughout my entire career,” he said in the interview.
Over the past two years, he has mounted an opposition to Mr. Trump in other ways, although he has had limited power to do so from the minority. Last year, he spoke for eight hours and 45 minutes on the House floor, breaking the record for the longest such speech in an attempt to slow — though he could not stop — the passage of Mr. Trump’s domestic policy bill. He kept House Democrats united through a 43-day partial government shutdown over funding for ICE.
Still, he drew intense criticism over the summer when it was revealed that he had secretly met with Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law, an encounter he said he had agreed to in order to press his agenda.
“Immigration may have come up,” he said. But mostly “we talked about how the housing affordability bill could be a foundation for the possibility of finding common ground with the other side of the aisle.”
He said that Mr. Kushner had not raised the topic of investigations into the president or his family members.
“He didn’t bring it up,” he said. “He knows me well enough to know that would backfire. Nobody is getting a pass in the face of the unprecedented corruption.”
An Agenda-Setting Majority
At a private August dinner in the Hamptons, hosted by Alex Soros and Huma Abedin, Mr. Jeffries mentioned to a group that included Bill and Hillary Clinton, as well as Antony J. Blinken, the former secretary of state, that Democrats could win 225 seats in the House.
“He had a glimmer in his eye, which I figured meant the real number was 235,” said Philippe Reines, a Democratic operative who attended the dinner. “But just a glimmer. Not a klieg light.”
Mr. Jeffries said Wednesday that he didn’t share his more optimistic predictions even in small groups.
“Internally, we thought there was a possibility of 240,” he said.
Democrats so far have won more than 250 seats, according to The Associated Press, and are on track to win their largest majority in the House since 2008.
The scale of the victory changes what Democrats can do with their power, even in a moment of divided government, he said. Mr. Jeffries said he is no longer thinking of measures that come to the House floor merely as political messages that cannot become law.
“There’s a real opportunity to decisively move bills,” Mr. Jeffries said.
He raised the possibility that many Democratic priorities — like reinstating expired Affordable Care Act health care premium subsidies and reversing the roughly $1 trillion in Medicaid cuts that were included in the president’s domestic policy law — could now not only easily pass the House next year but also clear the Senate and prove too popular for Mr. Trump to reject. He pointed to how a bipartisan housing overhaul became law in July after Mr. Trump refused to sign it, but also never vetoed it.
“The messaging before the election revolved around the fact that he was going to become something akin to Mr. Veto,” Mr. Jeffries said. Given the election results, he said, “we’re going to be strongly positioned to try to get some important things signed into law.”
Mr. Jeffries said he had not yet spoken to the president and was in no rush to do so.
“It remains unclear whether we can work with the White House,” he added, “but the ball is in their court at this point.”
There is no indication they would want to play. On Friday, Mr. Trump announced he was appointing Stephen Miller, an ideological loyalist who was the architect of his immigration crackdown, to serve as chief of staff.
Mr. Jeffries responded online: “Stephen Miller is a dangerous xenophobe and reckless extremist who has American blood on his hands. His presence in government should be eradicated like a malignant tumor. Fire him today.”
In the interview, Mr. Jeffries did not want to opine about what it would mean for himself and for the country to become the first Black speaker before it actually happens. But he hinted that he feels the weight that comes from breaking a barrier.
“Over the last four years, that pressure has already been on me,” he said. “Failure is not an option.”
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