House minority leader Hakeem Jeffries said on Friday that he is endorsing Zohran Mamdani for New York City mayor, ending a four-month standoff that left the Democratic nominee without the backing of one of the party’s most powerful figures until the day before early voting begins.
The announcement arrives after months of pressure from progressives in Congress and after the top Democrat has been repeatedly grilled by reporters about his reluctance to support his party’s candidate.
“Zohran Mamdani has relentlessly focused on addressing the affordability crisis and explicitly committed to being a mayor for all New Yorkers, including those who do not support his candidacy,” Jeffries wrote in a statement to the New York Times.
“In that spirit, I support him and the entire citywide Democratic ticket in the general election.”
The Brooklyn representative’s delay has been particularly striking given that Mamdani, a democratic socialist, won the primary and Jeffries’s district decisively in June to defeat former governor Andrew Cuomo in what was considered a seismic upset.
Jeffries’s endorsement makes the Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer the sole major Democratic congressional leadership holdout.
The lack of earlier endorsements has not stopped the city’s magnetism for Mamdani, who maintains a commanding lead in polls for the 4 November general election, when he will face independent candidate Cuomo and Republican Curtis Sliwa.
Jeffries’s extended hesitation stands in contrast with typical party unity timelines. New York governor Kathy Hochul, assembly speaker Carl Heastie and senate majority leader Andrea Stewart-Cousins all have endorsed Mamdani, as have New York representatives Jerry Nadler, Adriano Espaillat and Yvette Clarke – each of whom backed other candidates in the primary. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez endorsed Mamdani before the primary, and has campaigned with him since.
The minority leader has spent months deflecting questions from reporters, repeatedly instructing the media to “stay tuned” while insisting he had not refused to endorse, just that he “refused to articulate” his position. This hair-splitting did little to disguise what appeared to be profound discomfort with the 34-year-old democratic socialist whose upset primary victory upended the Democratic establishment’s expectations.
When pressed by CNBC in August about the continued questioning on his Mamdani stance, a visibly frustrated Jeffries shot back: “I’m trying to understand why you would spend a significant amount of time asking me about the Democratic nominee who’s not even the mayor.”
Jeffries, who raked in more than $1m from the pro-Israel lobby from 2023-2024, cited concerns about Mamdani’s past rhetoric on Israel and antisemitism, particularly the assembly member’s initial refusal to denounce the phrase “globalize the intifada”. Mamdani has also made the highly unlikely campaign promise to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu if he travels to New York.
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The House leader has also questioned how Mamdani would implement his progressive policies and combat gentrification in historically Black communities like those in Jeffries’s Brooklyn district. Some of the policies that Mamdani has advocated for include rent freezes, free city buses and municipal grocery stores, which have proven popular with the New York City electorate but not been endorsed by party leaders like Jeffries, despite Democratic voters’ increasing demand for more fight and a clear identity opposed to Trump’s agenda.
But the extended deliberation may also stem from political calculations: the leader is focused on recapturing the House majority in 2026, and some of his moderate battleground members view the progressive Mamdani as a potential liability.
The process that finally yielded Friday’s endorsement included two in-person meetings in Brooklyn, with civil rights leader Al Sharpton serving as a conduit between the two camps, anonymous sources tell Politico.
More recently, Jeffries appeared to soften his stance after Mamdani announced he would retain popular New York police department commissioner Jessica Tisch, a move the minority leader praised as “a positive step in the right direction”.
