Jeffries expected to win speakership with no real challenger
Arwa Mahdawi, a columnist for The Guardian, argued in commentary published November 14, 2026 that corporate Democrats are using identity politics to ward off reasonable criticism. The column’s standfirst read: “House members have responded to legitimate criticism with cynicism. Let’s not have another ‘Bernie bros’ moment.” Mahdawi opened by warning readers that disagreeing with her might mean they are “racist, homophobic and/or sexist” — an approach she said was “taking a page from the corporate Democrat playbook.” “From Haley Stevens to Hakeem Jeffries, cynically weaponizing identity politics to ward off reasonable criticism seems to be all the rage,” she wrote.
Mahdawi’s first example is Stevens, the Michigan representative, whom she wrote attempted to torpedo Abdul El-Sayed’s senate campaign by endorsing his Republican opponent, Mike Rogers, at the 11th hour. In an interview with conservative commentator Scott Jennings before the midterms, Stevens seemed to imply that sexism played a part in why she was not invited to an El-Sayed campaign event. “I gave [El-Sayed] an opportunity … to unite around something that everyone could agree on, and then I got disinvited instead,” Stevens told Jennings. “This is what happens to women.”
After El-Sayed won, Stevens posted a lengthy essay on Twitter/X. “For me, living my beliefs was never measured by who would win at the ballot box,” she wrote, adding: “As a woman, I have the right to make a decision and to change my mind.”
Mahdawi turned next to Hakeem Jeffries, who is expected to be the next speaker of the House. She wrote that he is “very chummy with Aipac” — the American Israel Public Affairs Committee — noting that he has received money from the group and that Aipac “has publicly boasted about supporting him.” On Thursday, Jeffries refused to say whether he supported or opposed controversial efforts to integrate the US and Israeli militaries. Jeffries also said this summer that he opposes Medicare for All, reversing his earlier position and putting him at odds with a number of progressive Democrats who campaigned on the platform.
Mahdawi wrote that Jeffries has been “consistently hostile to the progressive faction of his party,” refusing for months to endorse Mamdani for New York City mayor, and that it was recently revealed Jeffries met with Jared Kushner in private before the midterms, which she wrote did not go down very well. At an event on Friday, a protester yelled at Jeffries: “The American people demanded impeachment!” and “Your version of accountability is shaking hands with the Trump family!”
Mahdawi wrote that many progressives view Jeffries as an establishment figure who offers no hope for meaningful change and want someone less beholden to corporate interests to be speaker. Jeffries and some of his allies, meanwhile, have suggested that denying him the opportunity to become the first Black speaker in US history would be, to quote Bloomberg, “racially insensitive.”
During the June congressional primaries, a picture of Jeffries came up on screen at a victory party for Claire Valdez, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, and the crowd yelled: “You’re next!” Jeffries said in a CNN interview this week: “It was very interesting to me, as observed by others, that there was almost zero diversity in that crowd.”
Mahdawi disputed the implication, writing that there is “plenty of diversity amongst DSA-affiliated politicians.” She listed Zohran Mamdani, the first Muslim mayor of New York; Nithya Raman and Janeese Lewis George, who just got elected as the respective mayors of Los Angeles and Washington DC; and DSA members David Morales and Yousef Rabhi, who are going to be the next mayors of Providence, Rhode Island, and Ann Arbor, Michigan. She noted that all six of the DSA candidates elected to the House were “Black, brown, or from marginalized backgrounds.” Mahdawi acknowledged that DSA supporters skew white, but wrote that painting it as some sort of racist organization, “as Jeffries seems to be doing, is intellectually dishonest.”
Mahdawi wrote that this was “the Bernie bros playbook all over again.” Despite the fact that some polls found that young women supported Bernie Sanders in greater numbers than young men in the 2016 primaries, Sanders’ supporters were portrayed as misogynistic bros, she wrote. Hillary Clinton’s campaign may not have coined the term, Mahdawi added, but “leaned heavily into this bad-faith narrative.”
“Let’s not have a Bernie bros 2.0 moment, please,” Mahdawi wrote. A petition to make the progressive Massachusetts congresswoman Ayanna Pressley the speaker of the House reached around 100,000 signatures on Friday, she noted, while Jeffries faces no real challengers and is almost certainly going to be the next speaker. Her conclusion was addressed directly to him: “Jeffries has an opportunity to listen to reasonable concerns about his leadership and build a broad coalition that includes progressives instead of sidelining them.”
The column closed with a newsletter roundup of other stories. The roundup quoted the prime minister Peter Magyar saying on Thursday: “We are proposing a comprehensive package of measures to curb all forms of violence against women, for the safety and dignity of Hungarian women.” It noted that Magyar put an end to 16 years of soft autocracy by the far-right Viktor Orbán when he won a resounding election victory in April.
The roundup cited Guardian reporting from Afghanistan: “While there is no publicly announced restriction on male dentists treating women, a ban appears to have spread across the country,” and it reported that “In most provinces, male doctors have also received orders and directives from the Taliban instructing them not to examine female patients.”
On Saudi Arabia, the roundup quoted the activist Maryam Aldossari telling the Guardian: “It just shows the hypocrisy behind so-called Saudi reform.” She added: “We know MBS [Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince] has been trying to show the world that Saudi is becoming a modern country that empowers women, yet we see the court sentence a mother to 100 lashes.” Mahdawi wrote that large swathes of the western press have been complicit in whitewashing Prince Mohammed, whose “reforms” she called “a hollow PR exercise,” and noted that he has been described as a “psychopath” by an exiled intelligence officer.
The roundup also passed along Guardian reporting that “People describe it as a sudden dysphoria … that follows nipple stimulation,” noting that there is not much scientific research into it, that it is not an official medical diagnosis, and that there are a lot of interesting theories.
It quoted Owen Jones writing that “It is all too convenient to cast Netanyahu – wanted by the international criminal court for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity – as the bogeyman,” and that “the dehumanisation of Palestinians is so extreme that even their youngest, most defenceless members are regarded as legitimate targets by leading figures in both government and opposition.”
The roundup turned to revelations of Jensen Huang’s affair with a woman thought to be a Chinese spy, quoting Laëtitia Vitaud writing for FastCompany: “The story behind the phrase is that a good, hardworking man was minding his own business when a serpent of a woman lured him off the righteous path by dishonest means and propositions he, being a man, simply couldn’t refuse.” Vitaud also asked: “Can a 63-year-old billionaire CEO really be supposed to have no say over his sex life? Like a bear wouldn’t be able to resist honey?” The roundup added that while prenups may be all the rage right now, Jensen Huang’s wife does not appear to have one.
It also recalled Peanut the squirrel, who was euthanized by New York authorities and turned into a parable about Democratic government overreach by JD Vance, and reported that the squirrel’s former owner has been detained by ICE and may be deported.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist.