Politics / Hakeem Jeffries Is the Kind of Democrat Voters Have Lost Faith In With most New York Democrats endorsing their party’s candidate for mayor, the two minority leaders in Congress remain holdouts. So Jeffries spokesperson Justin Chermol, who no doubt carefully vetted his comments for placement in the Times, chimed in with this: “Leader Hakeem Jeffries will have more to say about the general election well in advance of Nov. 4. In short, Jeffries was then, as on so many other occasions, seeing how the political winds might break prior to committing himself either way. While that’s an undeniably worthy goal in and of itself, it’s scarcely commensurate to the scale of the authoritarian putsch now well under way at the behest of the Trump White House and its GOP allies in Congress. If he doesn’t, voters across the country may soon be asking, “Hakeem who?”