The man who will likely be the next House speaker, explained

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries speaks to the press on the steps of the US Capitol on September 30, 2026. | Finn Gomez/Getty Images Barring a catastrophic midterm polling miss, Democrats are on track to win a majority in the House of Representatives next month.

Come the new Congress in January, that will mean a new House speaker — and if all goes to plan, that will be current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.

If elected, Jeffries, from New York, will be the first Black speaker of the House.

Though Jeffries has been in Congress for nearly 14 years now — and many of those years have been spent in Democratic leadership — he also remains something of an enigma.

The New Yorker’s Jason Zengerle profiled Jeffries back in May.

He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about who Jeffries really is, his path to what would be a historic speakership, and what he really stands for.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity.

There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts , Pandora , and Spotify .

In your profile of potential future Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries, you start with a story that people might find surprising.

And I was wondering if you could tell us said story. [Jeffries] was in Florida, raising money, which is one of his central responsibilities as a minority leader.

And he was being driven to a Democratic donor’s house in Palm Beach.

And while he was being driven there, he got an alert on his phone letting him know that Donald Trump had posted a message to Truth Social in which he rehashed a bunch of the 2020 election conspiracies.

More significantly, [Trump] had included a depiction of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes .

Jeffries has this reputation for being a very calm, deliberate, not angry person, oftentimes to his detriment.