The House Speaker Election Is Unpredictable, but Hakeem Jeffries Is Unlikely to Win

Typically, the Speaker of the House is elected from the party that controls the body. Speaker Mike Johnson holds the job because Republicans are in the majority, and, given that Republicans retained the House in 2024, you might expect Johnson to retain the job.

Given tumult inside the Republican Party, though, some are wondering whether Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries could become Speaker of the House. Here's what we know about whether that's possible:

If every lawmaker shows up to vote for the Speaker, Johnson can only afford a single defection from the GOP if he wants to retain the Speaker's gavel. Because he has to keep his caucus almost completely unified, there's a great deal of uncertainty about what the outcome of this process might be. Johnson will need 218 votes to win the election, and at least one Republican has publicly said that they won't be supporting him.

Given that Johnson's candidacy is in question, you might be wondering whether Hakeem Jeffries could win the job. That seems hugely unlikely given that Democrats have a narrow minority in the House. The only thing Republicans hate more than each other are Democrats, and Jeffries would need to earn a couple of Republican votes if he wanted to become Speaker, and he is highly unlikely to get them.

Most Democrats are likely to support Jeffries unless a deal is struck that allows some of them to throw their support behind a Republican candidate. As a result, the question is really how long it will take a Republican to unify their caucus and find a Speaker that all but one of them can support. It took Kevin McCarthy 15 rounds of voting to achieve that in 2022, so there's a recent precedent for the Speaker vote taking quite a long time.

If it takes a while to name a Speaker, there are some fears that it could delay the certification of Trump's 2024 election victory. Johnson's allies have been making that argument explicitly, essentially saying that those not supporting Johnson could eventually face Trump's wrath. If Johnson can't get the votes and there isn't a permanent Speaker, though, it's possible for the House to elect a temporary leader to guide them through certification.

The inability of Republicans to elect a Speaker speaks to the general dysfunction inside of their governing coalition. They may have won the 2024 election, but Republicans' ability to govern the country is still very much in question, in part because they can't always agree on who should lead them, at least past Donald Trump.

Regardless, though, it's quite unlikely that Jeffries will be made Speaker of the House, as it would require more cooperation from Republicans than they have shown in decades. The Republicans would rather have a mess on their hands than elect a Democrat, and until Democrats have an outright majority in the House, Jeffries is unlikely to be Speaker.