PEEKSKILL, N.Y. — When Cait Conley took the stage here Saturday, she introduced Hakeem Jeffries by a title he doesn’t yet hold: “Speaker Jeffries.”

Jeffries himself won’t go that far. He won’t talk numbers or margins, or even officially say he’s running for speaker. But just over one week out from Election Day, he’s “confident” Democrats are going to win back the House.

“We’re watching the races in Texas and Florida closely,” the House minority leader said in an interview with MS NOW when asked what races might inform if Democrats are having a good night. “The MAGA extremists gerrymandered the congressional map in Texas and gerrymandered the congressional map in Florida to try to steal from those two states, nine different seats. That ain’t happening on Election Day, and we’re going to win several of those seats that were previously thought to be out of reach.”

The polls, the pundits and, privately, even some Republicans share his read of the national map, if not of every race on it. That includes this one in New York’s Hudson Valley, where Conley is challenging Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in the 17th District.

“What we’re thinking about right now is winning every single seat in front of us that’s competitive,” Jeffries told MS NOW.

Many of his members — and would-be members — already call him speaker. Jeffries won’t engage, insisting “we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.”

Yet his rise to the speakership is one of Washington’s safest predictions. Pressed on why he keeps dodging questions about his future plans, Jeffries said it’s “because we have to be focused on what’s in front of us. And what’s in front of us is November 3. Once we get through November 3, then we can focus on January 3 — which is the first day of the new Congress.”

The weeks between those two dates could prove crucial. The Trump administration has stoked fears of federal interference in the elections — be it with recent lawsuits in Alaska, or leaving the door open to deploying federal law enforcement agencies, like ICE, to polling places across the country.

Last week, a bipartisan group of lawmakers sent a letter to Jeffries and Speaker Mike Johnson urging a peaceful transfer of power. Jeffries said he hasn’t spoken to Johnson specifically about that letter. But, “generally, I’ve made clear to Speaker Johnson and to the Republicans — and we’ve said this publicly and privately — that we have to respect the will of the voters to ensure that there’s a peaceful transfer of power,” Jeffries said. “Whatever happens on November 3rd has to translate into who is in the majority on January 3rd.”

Asked how Johnson responded, Jeffries said: “Mike Johnson is not going to get into what he views as a hypothetical situation, and at the end of the day, we’ll cross that bridge when we get to it. I think the elections are going to be decisive enough that it’s going to be clear that Democrats are going to be in control of the House of Representatives. We’re going to see Democrats win up and down the ballot, and all across the country, as we’ve seen repeatedly since the very beginning of the Trump administration.”

Affordability and accountability

Jeffries believes the electoral tides have shifted in his party’s favor because of how he has guided its pushback against the president.

Polls show Trump as unpopular as ever, though Democrats still lag in favorability themselves. Jeffries pointed to polling that gives Democrats an edge in trust on most key issues, from the economy and inflation to the ongoing war in Iran. He credits that shift less to backlash against Trump than to “the fact that we’ve successfully and aggressively pushed back against MAGA extremism.”

That pushback is central to the two-part message Democrats are pitching on the trail: affordability and accountability.

On accountability, the next target may be Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has lately drawn fire from members of both parties in Washington. On the stump Saturday, Jeffries vowed to “run Pete Hegseth out of town.”

“It means that we’re going to hold him accountable in the same way that we held Pam Bondi and Kristi Noem accountable,” Jeffries said afterward. But Trump is the one who pushed out both Bondi, as attorney general, and Noem, as homeland security secretary, after controversies mounted, many of them stoked by lawmakers from both parties on Capitol Hill.

“And Pete Hegseth needs to be pushed aside by the president, or we’re going to have to deal with that situation if he is not.”

That is the closest Jeffries has come to backing impeachment. His stance could be tested days after the midterms, when a resolution introduced earlier this fall to impeach Hegseth is set to reach the House floor.

“What I’m inclined to do,” Jeffries said when asked whether he would support it, “is to act consistently with what I’ve said relative to Pete Hegseth from the very beginning: I called for Pete Hegseth to be fired by Donald Trump in the spring of 2025. He is deeply unqualified.”

The fight begins at home

For Jeffries, a New Yorker himself, this suburban seat is unfinished business. That’s not only because it could help hand Democrats the House majority.

The Brooklyn native has kept a close eye on how New York’s politics have shifted since 2022, when a string of House losses in the state helped give Republicans control of the chamber. Two years later, as Democrats reeled from Trump’s re-election, New York was a bright spot for the party: It flipped three of those five seats back into the blue column.

That’s the work Jeffries came to the Hudson Valley on Saturday to finish.

“This is the MAGA extremist’s last stand,” he said of New York’s 17th. “In 2024, we flipped four seats that were previously won by Republicans that are now held by Democrats, and we’re going to hold those seats in 2026. Mike Lawler pretends to be a common sense Republican, but he’s really just a MAGA puppet. Cait Conley is an American patriot, and I’m confident she’s going to flip this seat.”

A flipped seat and a new majority would bring Jeffries one step from the speakership. That would complete a generational handoff that began three years ago, when he succeeded Nancy Pelosi, who led House Democrats for two decades. If he wins the gavel, Jeffries would be the first Black speaker of the House.

He’s reluctant to talk about that, too, and invoked the late Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., to explain why.

“John Lewis, who we all, many of us, had the honor to serve with … he would always say, ‘Keep your eye on the prize.’”

Nothing is done until it’s done. But for Lewis, a lion of the civil rights movement, seeing a Black man hold the speaker’s gavel would surely have meant something.

“Well,” Jeffries allowed, going further than he has before, “it means a lot to me that I stand on his shoulders and the shoulders of so many incredible legends, like Shirley Chisholm, whose district I in part represent, and they would all encourage us, like Shirley Chisholm, to be ‘unbought and unbossed’ in the face of the type of extremism that’s been unleashed on the American people. We got to get through this moment. We got to win the House so we can begin the process of decisively ending this national nightmare.”

Lillie Boudreaux contributed to this article.

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