June 26, 2017

By Chris Brennan

Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic minority leader in the U.S. House, wants voters to know that her party is gaining momentum in the run-up to the 2018 mid-term elections.

And she has a cheat sheet to prove it.

It lists statistics on the recent special House elections held in Kansas, Montana, South Carolina and Georgia, called to fill seats vacated by Republican members of the House who joined President Trump’s administration.

Look at Pelosi’s cheat-sheet one way, and the Democrats went zero-for-four, with Republicans winning back all those seats. Momentum?

But look at it her way, and Democratic candidates narrowed the gap significantly in four places where Republicans typically win by big numbers.

Across three districts and Montana (whose lone representative is elected statewide), that adds up to a 70-percentage-point swing toward the Democratic candidates, compared to the party’s 2016 performances.

“Seventy points,” Pelosi said. “That’s a lot.”

The losses have some members of the Democratic caucus murmuring again about Pelosi’s leadership. Her toxicity among conservative voters helped the GOP attack the party’s candidates in the special races. So in Philadelphia, rather than basking in momentum, the California representative was having to explain it.

“We don’t think we should have to explain it but apparently we do,” she said. “I think it’s self-evident.”

Pelosi said Trump was able to chose favorable battlegrounds for the special elections, since he made the appointments that created the vacancies.

“He chose the places, knowing they would probably be won by Republicans,” she said. “We have gained ground. And those were never districts where we would have gone into. But we’re glad we did.”

Pelosi predicts the Democrats, who need to win 24 seats to retake the House, will be competitive in 70 districts across the country next year.

The Democratic Party will roll out a new economic message for the midterm elections after the July 4th holiday, Pelosi said, and work to cast those campaigns as “what is at stake” in decisions made by the U.S. Congress.

“There is definitely a movement afoot in Washington, it’s been there for a while, to deconstruct government,” Pelosi said, citing proposed cuts to the State Department, the Environmental Protection Agency, Medicaid, Medicare and other programs and agencies. “All of it is to reduce the role of government.”

Pelosi was in Philadelphia Monday to discuss economic development with elected officials, small business owners and nonprofit operators, hosted by The Food Trust, a nonprofit that works to provide access to healthy food and nutrition education.

She was joined by U.S. Rep. Dwight Evans, a Philadelphia Democrat, who praised her leadership while acknowledging that leading the “Democratic caucus has been a tough battle.”

“You could not have a better leader,” Evans said after the meeting. “She is authentic and she is very direct.”

Evans dismissed talk about party leadership as “inside baseball” that does not concern his constituents.

“No one talks to me about that,” he said. “They talk to me about jobs, jobs, jobs. They talk to me about education.”