What Hakeem Jeffries’ Albany Years Reveal About How He’d Lead The House

NEW YORK — On the road to becoming House Democratic leader, Hakeem Jeffries toiled for years under top-heavy leadership. He bore witness to corruption in the highest ranks of government. And, as he rose in stature, he established himself as a persuasive orator, hyper-engaged colleague and prolific fundraiser.

And that was before he got to Congress.

As the 56-year-old legislator seeks to become the first Black speaker of the House, clues to how he engineered such a rapid rise — and how he’ll govern if Democrats win the House — can be traced back to the rough-and-tumble world of statehouse politics in New York, where he served as an assemblymember representing parts of Brooklyn from 2007 through 2012.

While in Albany, Jeffries hardly mastered the levers of power. He wasn’t around long enough to earn a committee chair position. He wasn’t senior enough to carry the conference’s marquee legislation. And he passed only a fraction of the 242 bills he sponsored.

Yet he carved out a legislative record establishing himself as a credible voice on criminal justice issues. And the lessons offered by Albany at the time — with half of its Legislature beset by factionalism and a hard-charging executive damaged by scandal — offered a valuable preview of what he could face in Washington.

Jeffries could inherit an unwieldy House. He could face a Senate with razor-thin margins. And he already has plans to launch probes into President Donald Trump and many of his aides.

But the leadership style he began developing in Albany is in many ways an odd fit with the current political moment.

In an age where voters are gravitating toward partisan pugilists, Albany colleagues almost universally recall Jeffries as a cerebral and studious legislator willing to work with peers of all ideological persuasions. They remember his speeches in conference meetings and the Assembly chamber that, while demonstrating a deep grasp of logic and policy, were delivered only infrequently, as if to maximize their impact.

“He thinks things out like a chess player, four or five moves in advance,” said David Paterson, a Democrat who served as New York governor during some of Jeffries’ tenure in Albany. “To me, he’s like a modern-day Columbo. While you’re putting him down, he’s planning how to take you out.”

As Jeffries now seeks one of the most difficult jobs in American politics, his origin story underscores a broader change in Democratic politics.

Once an insurgent candidate who so thoroughly irked the New York establishment they drew his apartment out of the Assembly district he eventually won, Jeffries is now facing criticism from the party’s left. From their perch, the Democratic leader is out of touch with the issues animating the party base and far too reliant on a bygone way of doing business.

Whether he can prove them wrong will not only write the next chapter of his story. It will influence where the cartoon dust cloud of infighting that is today’s Democratic Party drifts next.

“He comes off as someone who fits more directly into the prior generation: Very buttoned-up, very message-tested talking points,” said one New York Democratic consultant granted anonymity to candidly discuss Jeffries’ political standing. “There’s a handful of issues that are driving the extremes of the party, and he tends to fall squarely into the older thinking on them: Israel is one. Medicare for All is another. I’m not saying the vanguard is right. But he’s not on the vanguard.”

At least, not anymore.

After stints at a white-shoe law firm and as a corporate lawyer for Viacom and CBS, Jeffries launched his first political campaign in 2000 at the age of 29, going hard at incumbent Roger Green over accusations he was failing an Assembly district that included the Brooklyn enclave where Jeffries was born, raised and had moved back to with his wife.

“You’re out of touch,” a mustachioed Jeffries said during a heated debate in which Green later stormed off the set.

Jeffries, a devout Baptist, had brought up Green’s Muslim faith on air, which the incumbent found divisive. It ultimately didn’t matter. Jeffries lost by 18 points.

When New York redrew its Legislative boundaries two years later, Jeffries was meticulously notched out of the seat, an act of institutional retribution for his perceived insolence, giving him an early taste for creative line-drawing that has parallels to today’s redistricting wars between Democrats and Republicans. He challenged the incumbent anyway, this time with even worse results.  

It wasn’t until Green gave up his seat to run for Congress that Jeffries won in 2006 after moving back into the redrawn 57th District.

Scott Levenson, head of political consulting and lobbying firm the Advance Group, was hired by Jeffries on those early campaigns and said his client had a congenital predisposition for public service: His mother was a social worker and his father was a state substance abuse counselor. Politics, activism, Black history and the expectation of academic achievement were very much discussed at the dinner table.

“He comes from an active political family,” Levenson said in an interview. “He didn’t grow up in the restaurant business.”

Even back then, Levenson said, Jeffries was exhibiting qualities that would come to define him in Congress.

“The guy bangs the phone all the time; and he’s got a nice way about him, so people want to talk to him,” Levenson said of Jeffries’ efforts to raise money and build coalitions. “I talk to Republicans who don’t hear bombastic, they hear thoughtful and balanced. And with the margin he’s going to be served, that’s probably a good thing.”

In January 2007, at long last, Jeffries arrived in Albany as a backbench legislator. What he found was the country’s third-largest public institution — second only to the federal government and the State of California — in chaos.

The state Capitol during that era was riven by Democratic infighting and scandal — giving Jeffries a front row seat for how dysfunction and small majorities can dash legislative dreams and how more disciplined institutions can fill the power vacuum.

Beginning in 2009, Democrats spent an unhappy two years leading the state Senate, an era marred by intraparty feuds and a debilitating leadership coup. Several senators would go on to be accused of engaging in public corruption during these years.

The governor, Eliot Spitzer, charged into office as a national political celebrity, only to squander that momentum by waging war with Democrats and Republicans alike. He resigned in 2008 in the middle of a prostitution scandal, paving the way for Paterson, his lieutenant, to take over for the remainder of his term.

The brunt of governing fell to Jeffries’ colleagues in the Democratic-dominated state Assembly.

“It definitely weighed on the Assembly that we were the adult institution in the room,” said Rory Lancman, a colleague who worked with Jeffries on several pieces of legislation. “But also, that meant we could dictate terms to an unusual degree.”

By that time, the chamber had been led for over a decade by the powerful Manhattan Democrat Sheldon Silver. His top-down approach — deciding which bills came to the floor for a vote, doling out leadership stipends to allies and punishing dissenters — rankled lawmakers. But Silver, who would be ousted from power in 2015 after being accused of felony fraud and corruption, maintained one of the few stable centers of power in Albany until Andrew Cuomo’s election as governor in 2010.

It was in this atmosphere — a combination of deep Democratic Party disarray and iron-fisted rule — that Jeffries came of political age before ever working under the velvet-gloved iron fist of California Rep. Nancy Pelosi and prosecuting Trump’s first impeachment.

By the numbers, Jeffries was a middle-of-the-pack legislator, according to a POLITICO analysis of his performance in 2011, his penultimate year in office. He sponsored 87 bills (the 27th most in a 99-person Democratic conference), backed four that were approved by both houses of the Legislature (45th) and voted the same way as leadership 98 percent of the time (62nd).

In his final year in the statehouse, Jeffries was fighting an intense congressional primary against then-New York City Council member Charles Barron. As is common for state lawmakers seeking higher office, he missed 75% of votes in the Assembly.

But numbers aren’t everything in the state Capitol, where much of the action takes place behind closed doors. Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie, Silver’s successor, said Jeffries’ oratory supporting legislation to change the way prison inmates are counted in the U.S. Census stood out. That measure, which tallied people according to their home communities rather than the districts where they were imprisoned, ultimately passed as part of Paterson’s state budget.

“There’s certain legislators where, when there’s a debate that they’re in, you stop whatever you’re doing because they have such command of the issues,” Heastie said.

Jeffries, he added, “is one of the best communicators I’ve seen in my 26 years in the Legislature.”

While in Albany, Jeffries also began to develop an understanding of legislative institutions, which would go on to aid his meteoric rise in Congress.

Several years into his tenure in the state Capitol, Democratic Rep. Yvette Clarke called a meeting of Black elected officials in Brooklyn to address one of the most explosive issues of the day: The NYPD’s use of stop-and-frisk to target mostly Black and Latino men for invasive and often public searches.

At the time, police officers were on track to stop and frisk more than a half-million New Yorkers with nearly no criminal charges to show for it. Clarke wanted something done.

At the close of the meeting, members of the New York Civil Liberties Union approached Jeffries with an idea, according to Donna Lieberman, executive director of the organization since 2001: Would the assemblymember carry legislation to bar the NYPD from electronically retaining identifying information about people stopped and released without further legal action?

Jeffries agreed, and, after introducing the bill, gave what several colleagues recalled as a stirring floor speech about the need for urgent action. The initiative turned out to be a relatively easy sell in the deep-blue Assembly. It was in the state Senate, where Democrats had just won a narrow and ultimately fleeting majority, where one of Jeffries’ most memorable legislative victories was at risk.

Selecting a cosponsor in the other chamber is an art unto itself. A successful pick requires knowing alliances, rivalries and the proclivities of leadership in a separate legislative body. Jeffries’ decision demonstrated all of those things, according to one person involved in negotiations who was granted anonymity to discuss private deliberations. But it also showed a willingness to reach outside his circle of core allies — in this case, by tapping Eric Adams, then a freewheeling state senator with an overlapping district and, years later, New York City’s mayor.

The two men have long had a cool relationship, even if they’ve mostly praised each other in public. Polar opposites in style, they had backed different candidates for city comptroller and public advocate in 2009 and would go on to fight numerous other proxy battles over the years.

In 2010, though, Adams, a former police captain, stood in well as a credible messenger and outspoken critic of overpolicing. During closed-door Senate Democratic conference meetings, according to the person involved in the bill negotiations who spoke with POLITICO, Adams would patiently explain to members vulnerable to pressure from police unions why stop-and-frisk was not actually improving public safety.

Jeffries, meanwhile, agreed to limit the bill’s scope to New York City to garner support from upstate members.

“I think he was very shrewd,” said the person involved in the bill negotiations. “He was feeling his way into the politics of it and trying to get a read of how things were cutting.”

The bill’s passage gave both Jeffries and Adams a major legislative win, propelling their careers on upward trajectories and sparking a last-ditch and ultimately unsuccessful push for a gubernatorial veto from Mayor Michael Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond Kelly.

“Stop-and-frisk was becoming a national issue, and the NYPD, love ’em or hate ’em, is a force to be reckoned with,” Lieberman said, recalling Jeffries’ work on the legislation. “This was his first foray onto the national stage. It was important for him.”

Manhattan Democratic Chair Keith Wright, a former state assemblymember, summed up Jeffries’ Albany years by recalling longstanding bipartisan basketball games in which they both participated.

“He didn’t have to be the one scoring the points, but he was down underneath the basket getting the rebound,” Wright said, noting that Jeffries was not a trash-talker. “He was making sure other people were scoring the points.”

That approach has proven fruitful. During his latter years in state government, he was already drawing comparisons to Barack Obama. And once he got to Congress, he rocketed up the pecking order to become chair of the House Democratic Caucus in just six years before being elected minority leader at the end of 2022.

It may not have been fast enough to keep up with an increasingly fractured Democratic Party.

While he enjoys strong support among House Democrats broadly, the Jeffries school of politics is already seen as passé by the young activist class, portending a potentially difficult speakership that will require him to manage factions with deeply disparate goals. The left sees him as too deferential to Israel supporters and has criticized him for taking his name off Medicare for All legislation after co-sponsoring it for years.

Ironically, though, it's a dynamic Jeffries has dealt with his entire career, according to Basil Smikle Jr., the former head of the New York State Democratic Party and generational peer of the presumptive House speaker.

Green, the Assembly incumbent Jeffries ran such a spirited campaign against, got his start in the civil rights movement. And along with an entire generation of Black activists, he paved the way for younger leaders like Jeffries. That generational transfer of power, however, did not always come easily, according to Smikle.

Ambitious young New Yorkers like Jeffries, who broke with the establishment to endorse Obama for president in 2008, were eager to have their shot at shaping government. Battle-hardened activists, though, remained skeptical of their juniors, who came of age long after the struggles against racism, voter suppression, segregation and outright violence began.

“In a way, it has come full circle,” Smikle said. “Hakeem has had to prove himself as an activist throughout history. And he’s still trying to prove that he has that muscle.”

Madison Fernandez contributed to this report.