Chi Ossé's Uphill (and Unwelcome?) Primary Challenge

Chi Ossé (D-NY)

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries has only been in his leadership office for a little over two years, and I'll be honest-I'm relatively underwhelmed.  It has to be next to impossible to succeed Nancy Pelosi, inarguably the best congressional leader in decades, maybe even since the era of Sam Rayburn & Lyndon Johnson, but Jeffries' feels thin by comparison.  He doesn't have the ability to wrangle his caucus the way that she did (the entire Marie Gluesenkamp Perez/Chuy Garcia debate it's impossible to see happening when Pelosi was in charge), and he isn't as strong at public relations or reading the room on congressional messaging.  I am not as mad at him as I am Chuck Schumer, whom I'm actively hoping steps down at this point as Senate leader, but if you gave me a magic wand to get rid of him and replace him with someone like Katherine Clark or Ted Lieu...I'd probably take it.

The thing is, there is a New York City Councilor attempting to give the voters of Jeffries' district just that.  In the past few days, Chi Ossé has filed to run against Jeffries in a primary.  This is part of a wave of Democratic challenges in the Big Apple coming off of Mayor-Elect Zohran Mamdani's upstart campaign to win control of America's largest city.  Not just Jeffries, but Rep. Dan Goldman looks likely to get one from New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, Yvette Clarke already has one, and other representatives like Adriano Espaillat & George Latimer are expected to have ones as well.  But it's Ossé's that's most notable because he's challenging the Democratic leader.  

It's also notable because of the rather swift cold shoulder it's gotten from Democrats in the party who have a history of disrupting the paradigm and going after established politicians.  Mamdani was demure, but clear with his public comments about Ossé, stating "while I appreciate the great work that Councilmember Ossé has done on the council...I believe that there are many ways right here in New York City to...deliver an affordability agenda" and according to The New York Times, Mamdani publicly discouraged Ossé from running.  Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was more direct, saying, "I certainly don't think a primary challenge to the leader is a good thing right now."

This is the sort of behavior that is always a little laughable, but inevitable, when someone "unexpectedly" wins power in the American system.  While there are exceptions (David Hogg being the best recent example), by-and-large when a candidate like Ossé (or, when they started their campaigns, Mamdani & Ocasio-Cortez) runs for office, they have to do so by railing against the establishment, demanding that there be change in government that only new voices can solve.  When they actually win, though, they realize that they are rare-most incumbents win reelection for major US office (certainly they do in primaries), so beating an incumbent like Mamdani & Ocasio-Cortez did makes them stand out.  They also realize that 1) because they're rare, they either need to assimilate or risk not being in the room when decisions are made and 2) that not all of the "establishment" that they are railing against are that bad, and in many cases are nice backbenchers who are trying to do similar things to themselves (but who ultimately aren't successful because governance in a country as evenly-divided as America is hard).  This reads as hypocritical (and it is...this is very much "listen to what I say, not what I do"), but it's also reality-Mamdani & Ocasio-Cortez got the lottery ticket, and (unlike Hogg) they wanted to keep it, and so they adapt to the realities of actual governance, and part of that is not taking down the people of their party they work with everyday.

But I'm not a sitting member of Congress or a Mayor-Elect...I don't have a vested interest in making my fellow coworkers happy (metaphorical ones...on the off-chance this is read by any of my actual coworkers, I do have a vested interest in them being happy).  And yet, despite not really wanting Jeffries in office & knowing a primary challenge is probably the only way that he isn't our next Democratic Speaker...I agree with Mamdani & Ocasio-Cortez.  The reason for this is pretty straight-forward: it's a distraction when we don't need one.

Primary challenges to congressional leadership happen regularly, most of them without much fanfare (Nancy Pelosi has had one pretty much every cycle she's been leader).  There are exceptions though, with the two most recent ones being House Majority Leader Eric Cantor and House Caucus Chair Joe Crowley.  In the case of both men, each was expected (like Jeffries) to be his party's next-in-line for Speaker.  In both cases, they were challenged by virtual unknowns who managed to take their party base's anger at leadership not doing what they wanted (like Ossé), and shock the political world by defeating one of the most powerful people in Washington.  Crowley, you may know, was the guy who lost to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (Cantor lost to Dave Brat, who enjoyed a few unremarkable terms in office before losing in 2018 to now Gov-Elect Abigail Spanberger).

And in both cases, the headlines of it were bad for the party.  We had weeks of people saying that this was a public rebuke to Speaker John Boehner & House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, respectively, and in the case of Boehner, he would barely hold on a year after Cantor's loss before he would choose (because he was basically forced to) to step down as Speaker.  It's a bad look-it makes your party look weak.  There are, in my opinions, better ways to improve your leader's position (for starters, giving him a majority), and so as a result I don't support Ossé's quest here, even if I understand it (and might be hypocritical myself in thinking Schumer deserves this path...but that's a conversation for another day).  Jeffries is not a strong leader, but he's also not to the point where he has proven ineffective (we still haven't seen him with an actual majority yet, and leader styles are very different from majority to minority), and while I think that in the future this might have to be the path worth taking, in the wake of Mamdani's unexpected victory, I don't think it's wise for us to spend much of the 2026 election wondering who will succeed Hakeem Jeffries rather than focusing on the more pressing task of winning majorities in both houses of Congress (and given people like Mamdani & Ocasio-Cortez are already standing in his way, I doubt Ossé has a chance to make this competitive enough for that to happen).