Who will succeed Pelosi?

Democratic members of Congress won’t talk about any of this publicly, as if Pelosi might suddenly appear and pull their hearts from their chests. Jeffries, carefully, left it at telling me that growing up in a Black church taught him to respect and value his elders. But none of the two dozen Democratic members of Congress and party insiders I spoke with privately could present a serious alternative to Jeffries. He’d have the support of the Congressional Black Caucus, which is stacked with influential members. He’s popular with his colleagues, even those who grumble that he was too meek to challenge Pelosi earlier—“Hakeem is really good at taking in both ideas but also criticism, and not being defensive about it,” said Representative Katherine Clark of Massachusetts, Jeffries’s close ally in House leadership, who is expected to end up in the No. 2 spot if he’s No. 1. In conversations with colleagues, Clark and Jeffries have said they’re moving forward as a team, determined to avoid the rumbling rivalry Pelosi and Hoyer have had since their days as congressional interns, in 1963…

The activists who have asserted themselves as the arbiters of progressivism, including groups like the Justice Democrats, don’t tend to like Jeffries, and he doesn’t like them. The policy differences between them are hard to see. The bad feelings, though, can be traced to 2018, when he beat the left flank’s choice, Representative Barbara Lee of California, for his leadership spot. His victory prompted a retaliatory threat, sourced to people close to fellow New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, that he would be a “highest priority” target in a 2020 primary. (No challenge ever materialized; Jeffries demurred when I asked about Ocasio-Cortez, and her spokesperson declined to comment—though only after asking what Jeffries had said about the representative.) The AOC wing’s main complaint with Jeffries is that although he talks often about climate change, he doesn’t endorse the Green New Deal. He doesn’t like feeling bullied into signing on. He believes that activists are too caught up in thinking about changing society around environmental goals, rather than the systemic racism that he wants to focus on.