Hakeem Jeffries may not only have to count votes across the aisle if Democrats win the House in November. He may have to count them on his own side, too. John Leganski, a former aide to Kevin McCarthy, said Democratic leaders are likely to face tactics from the left that look a lot like the pressure House Republicans endured from their right flank.
The warning lands now because Democrats are seeing a fresh sign of that pressure. Last Tuesday, Melat Kiros, a 29-year-old democratic socialist, beat 15-term incumbent Diana DeGette in Colorado after a primary shaped by rising opposition to Israel and support for universal healthcare. Leganski said that kind of result should make Jeffries’ office uneasy, because in a narrow House, even a small bloc of lawmakers deciding not to back a leader can turn a speaker race into a scramble.
Leganski’s point is simple math. A speaker needs a majority of the votes cast on the House floor, so if Democrats win a slim majority, Jeffries would need nearly every Democrat in the room. He said candidates like Kiros may decide not to vote for him at all if they reach Washington carrying the same anti-leadership argument that surfaced in Colorado. In his telling, the danger is not that every progressive would break away, but that even a handful could force Jeffries to spend his opening weeks doing what McCarthy once had to do: stitching together a majority vote by vote.
McCarthy’s experience is the cautionary tale. House Republicans forced 15 votes for the speakership before he was elected in January 2023, and he was out eight months later. Leganski said Democrats are about 10 years behind Republicans in this evolution, where the most ideologically intense members gain real leverage over the party’s center. He cited Joe Crowley’s loss to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in New York in 2018 as an early sign of the shift and said, flatly, that history does not repeat itself but it rhymes.
That warning carries extra weight because Republicans have not escaped the same problem. Mike Johnson of Louisiana replaced McCarthy, but the fight never disappeared; it just changed shape. It now takes nine Republicans to introduce a motion to vacate the speakership, yet Johnson still had to wrestle with a Freedom caucus revolt that defeated a rules vote and sent the House home early. The threshold is higher than it was for McCarthy, but the strain on party control is still there.
Leganski, who wrote Glory, Grief, and the Gavel about how far-right Republicans brought down McCarthy, said he sees Congress moving toward something like a pseudo-parliamentary system, where factions matter almost as much as party labels. That is why he keeps coming back to Colorado. If Democrats take the House, the first test for Jeffries may not be whether Republicans can block him. It may be whether enough Democrats decide they do not want to hand him the gavel at all.
