Let me guess. You thought the GOP was the only party whose elected officials weren’t actually representing their voters. You might have gotten that idea from the column I wrote this morning. Not so.
Are y’all ready for this? According to Axios, House Democrats are being bombarded with phone calls and emails urging them not to make Hakeem Jeffries speaker of the House.
Think of it: The Democrats just won bigly. They’re headed for a majority of more than 250 seats. And the first thing their own voters did with the victory was start ringing congressional phones off the hook, demanding a different leader.
The numbers aren’t small. One incoming House Democrat says they’ve fielded about 150 calls since Election Day. A senior House Democrat reported more than 500 in two days. Another office counted between 300 and 400.
Most of it traces back to a Change.org petition titled “House Democrats: CHOOSE A NEW SPEAKER,” started back on September 3 by Nicole Whitted, a Democrat-friendly social media creator with a sizable TikTok following. The petition argues the speaker should represent Democrat voters, “not just the Democratic establishment.” For two months, it went nowhere. Then the election happened. On Wednesday, Whitted said it was at almost 20,000 signatures. By Thursday, it had passed 500,000. By Friday, it topped 920,000.
So what lit the fuse? According to one House Democrat, much of it came from actor Mark Ruffalo, who shared the petition and told his followers to sign it if they want a new speaker. Hollywood, it turns out, has opinions about House leadership. Who knew?
What do these voters actually want? According to Axios, the complaint from the grassroots is that party leaders put up too little resistance to the Trump administration. Can you beat it? Democrats just took both chambers of Congress, and their base thinks the leadership was too soft.
Now, I’ll be fair about this, because I was fair about my own side this morning. Jeffries isn’t going anywhere. He formally announced his bid in a letter to colleagues Wednesday, no challenger has stepped forward, and no House Democrat has voted against him for speaker since he became leader in 2022. A senior progressive put the odds of Jeffries falling short at “0.0%.” Rep. Jim Himes, CT, said flatly that Jeffries absolutely will be speaker. And a Change.org petition is not a ballot box. Anybody with an email address can sign one, from anywhere on the planet, as many times as they have email addresses.
But don’t miss the point. This morning, in the comments on this morning’s column, I told you about Ron DeSantis taking Senate Republicans apart on Laura Ingraham’s show, arguing that GOP voters stayed home because Washington Republicans never even tried to deliver the bold conservative agenda they campaigned on. Now look at the other side of the aisle. Same disease, opposite symptoms. Republican voters were mad that their leaders did too little. Democrat voters are mad that their leaders resisted too little.
In both parties, the people in the cheap seats are well ahead of the people with the gavels. The difference is which direction they’re pulling. The GOP base wants its leaders to actually govern like conservatives. The Democrat base wants its leaders to fight Trump harder, and for the next two years, that base just got a majority to make demands of.
Look, I have no doubt that Jeffries will get his gavel. But he’ll be holding it with roughly 900,000 people, a movie star, and a TikTok creator looking over his shoulder, all convinced he’s an establishment squish. Every time he hesitates on a subpoena, an impeachment resolution, or a funding fight, they’ll be back on the phones. A speaker who’s afraid of his own base doesn’t moderate. He gives the base what it wants, at least, if they’re a Democrat. Republicans, not so much.
Republicans who stayed home Tuesday should think about that. You wanted to send Washington a message. Yeah, OK. Message received. Now you get two years of a House run by people who, inexplicably, believe Hakeem Jeffries has been too nice to Donald Trump.
Think about who these people are. This is the same Hakeem Jeffries who spent the last two years calling the administration’s every move an attack on democracy, who led his caucus in near-lockstep opposition to nearly everything Republicans brought to the floor, and who never once lost a Democrat vote for leader. To the folks burning up the House switchboard this week, that’s not resistance. That’s collaboration.
And they aren’t a fringe you can wave off. I wrote a few weeks back about the 282 DSA-endorsed candidates Brookings counted this cycle. Abdul El-Sayed carried the Democrat banner in Michigan’s Senate race. Graham Platner, who once aligned himself with the DSA, won the Democrat Senate nomination in Maine. Here in New York, Zohran Mamdani runs City Hall. The petition against Jeffries didn’t come out of nowhere. It grew out of a movement that has spent years winning primaries, taking over local parties, and dragging the national party to the left one district at a time. (And by the way, that makes the case for growing the GOP from the bottom up that I made in this morning’s daily).
Now that movement has a majority to make demands of. Every subpoena Jeffries declines to issue, every impeachment resolution he slow-walks, and every funding bill he negotiates instead of blowing up will be met with another wave of calls, another petition, and another celebrity post. And remember what usually happens to a leader who’s afraid of his own base: He gives it what it wants, then claims it was his idea all along. The Democrat with any talent at all can step in front of a lynch mob and act like it’s a parade he's leading. Bill Clinton had that one down pat, as an example.
Oh, before I forget, I’m seeing similar comments about Chuckles Schumer getting the same treatment from the base. I'm thinking we'll see Matt Margolis touching on that one in the next day or so. He's calling it the upcoming Democrat Civil War. Probably as accurate a description as any.
It comes down to this: However bad you thought the Democrats in Congress have been, the rank and file is even more radical. The people we’ve been fighting for the last two years are the moderates in that party. Their voters think they’re sellouts.
That’s who’s holding the gavel in January. Next time somebody tells you to sit out an election to “send a message,” remember who’s listening.
Related: So, What's Next?