Overthrowing Pelosi to save Democratic Party is dangerous — to Republican campaign strategy
Odd Couple: Both Nancy Pelosi and Republicans want Pelosi to remain Dem House leader
In the aftermath of four Special Election defeats, including a devastating loss in Georgia’s Sixth District, Democrats are trying to figure out where it all went wrong.
Democrats were expecting anti-Trump *Resistance* to be enough. But it wasn’t. It’s not that focusing intently on the opposing party’s leader doesn’t work anymore. It’s that the leader against whom such a tactic worked wasn’t Republican Donald Trump, but Democrat Nancy Pelosi.
Supporters of Karen Handel pegged Democrat Jon Ossoff as just another Pelosi puppet. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution noted the Pelosi effect:
President Donald Trump may have been the 800-pound gorilla in Georgia’s 6th District race, but Nancy Pelosi ended up being the albatross.
Republican Karen Handel’s larger-than-expected win over Democrat Jon Ossoff Tuesday proved how potent her side’s messaging regarding the House minority leader could be in mobilizing GOP voters.
Handel and her allies took every opportunity on the campaign trail to frame Ossoff as a shill for the California Democrat whose values were more in line with Pelosi’s home base of San Francisco than Georgia’s.
“Let me tell you something, he’s a puppeteer and the strings are being pulled by Democrats and the Nancy Pelosi,” Agriculture Secretary and former Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue said of Ossoff at a rally last weekend.
Here’s an example of an ad tying Ossoff to Pelosi:
It’s a tactic Republicans have used successfully for several election cycles, even when Obama was on the ballot and otherwise popular. Under Pelosi’s control, Democrats lost their majority in the House in the 2010 Tea Party wave which openly was an anti-Pelosi movement because of her role in passing Obamacare.
Pelosi strolling towards the Capitol with a large gavel in hand became an iconic image which could rally Republican troops.
And it worked in Georgia again.
While there have been grumblings and tentative challenges to Pelosi’s minority leadership in the House, in the wake of the Georgia loss those grumblings are out in the open and becoming more heated.
Politico reports, Pelosi faces growing doubts among Dems after Georgia loss:
….the fact that Republicans spent millions of dollars on TV ads tying Democratic hopeful Jon Ossoff to Pelosi — and the brand of progressive policies she represents — shows that she will once again be an issue for Democratic challengers in the very districts that the party needs to win to make her speaker again….
“I think you’d have to be an idiot to think we could win the House with Pelosi at the top,” said Rep. Filemon Vela (D-Texas), who supported Pelosi in her last leadership race. “Nancy Pelosi is not the only reason that Ossoff lost. But she certainly is one of the reasons.”
Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.), who backed a challenge to Pelosi last year, said the results of the Ossoff race further underscore that Pelosi should let someone else take the reins.
“There comes a time when every leader has to say, ‘For the good of the order and for the betterment of the party, it’s time for me to step aside.’ And I wish that that would happen right now,” Rice said in an interview. “This is not a personal thing. I want to get back in the majority.”
Aaron Blake at The Washington Post writes The Democrats’ persistent Pelosi problem:
[Representative] Vela is right that Pelosi isn’t the reason Ossoff lost. She may not even be the biggest reason (there was the conservative lean of the district, Ossoff’s residency issues, questions about his message, etc.). But it’s also pretty clear — and has been for some time — that in the types of districts Democrats need to win to retake the majority, she is an effective cudgel. And more than that, she’s about the only good cudgel Republicans have left right now.
Polls have regularly shown this, of course. But now that President Barack Obama is out of office, Pelosi is really the only game in town for the GOP. And notably more than six years after her speakership ended after the 2010 election, she continues to draw similarly passionate opposition….
And as shorthand for “liberal,” you can’t get much better than the House minority leader from San Francisco.
How bad is the Pelosi brand? DEMOCRAT Joe Cunningham is running for Congress in the 1st District of South Carolina promising that if elected, he will not support Pelosi:
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None of this is likely to deter Pelosi from retaining her leadership position. She’s already rallying the troops, as AP reports:
The House Democratic leader is seeking to reassure Democrats dejected after a loss in a Georgia special election where the party invested millions of dollars.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California says in a letter to colleagues Wednesday that when President Donald Trump nominated House members to serve in his administration, he chose them from Republican districts the party knew it could win.
She says Democrats “gave them a run for their money in all of them.”
Pelosi insists Democrats still have a shot at winning the majority in next year’s midterm elections, saying, “The House remains in play now.”
Will Democrats finally throw Pelosi overboard to save the party? Republicans sure are hoping the Democrats keep her just where she is.
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Comments
Nancy, please, please, don’t go. We need ya.
As someone said to George, “You’re their all-time best seller.”
I think SanFranNan is planning on going the way of Ted Kennedy, Robert Byrd, Joe Moakley (a real scum), Tom Lantos, John Murtha, Daniel Inouye, Frank Lautenberg –
Feet first.
Pelosi is just an oozing genital wart on the putrescent democrat body.
As despicable as Nancy Pelosi happens to be, she is not the reason Karen Handel won the special election in Georgia’s 6th District. John Assoff got the same 47 percent of the votes in the run-off as he got in the primary, and Handel got about the same percentage that she would have gotten if she had been the only Republican running in the primary. That is the way the political cookie crumbles in that district at this time. Dr. Price got a much larger percentage of the vote in the general election because he was an incumbent who was well known and well liked. Karen Handel is not a charismatic and exciting speaker, but she is very well known and is generally well liked. She is a rather solid conservative, not given to extreme verbals, trustworthy, and a good girl scout. That is why the Republican voters came out to vote for her. Handel won mostly because of local politics, a solid candidate, and a desire to keep the extreme Democrats out of power in Washington. Just not really very complicated.
“Will Democrats finally throw Pelosi overboard to save the party? Republicans sure are hoping the Democrats keep her just where she is.”
It only matters to those Republicans who ran on the official GOP platform that carried David Brat and Donald Trump to victory but then failed to support their president once elected.
Were these weasels to face a Trump-endorsed primary challenger, with Pelosi gone the focus would be entirely on how they refused to support the platform that they were all elected to deliver.
If Congress fails to deliver repeal of ObamaCare and tax reform by the summer recess, they will have failed utterly. With the Dems cratering and re-cratering in their quest for total self-destruction, Trump can control the only narrative that will matter. WHY DID YOU BLOCK THE CHANGE WE ELECTED YOU TO DELIVER!?!
Good luck with the dollars Ryan could send your way from the Speaker’s Re-election Fund. Trump will beat you with pennies on the dollar. Like I have pointed out so often for the last 10+ years, it’s much more expensive to sell cancer to the dying than it is to sell water to the thirsty. Trump is a water salesman. His endorsement kills cancer salesmen.
Overthrowing Pelosi might be a mistake like killing Hitler in 1942 before he was done losing the war for Germany.
We have bigger fish to fry than Pelosi: namely, the rats of the GOPe – namely, paul boehner, granny mcconnell and their rat friends.
Pelosi is about as relevant as hillary clinton. The left had a new face (pajama boy) and he fell on his face.
Trump is an alpha – the nation is following him. We desperately need to dump the GOPe from leadership positions in Congress.
Before pelosi goes, can we smack her once with that hammer?
use the hammer on McLame the foul fool who has used his Vietnam jail to jail the GOPe and the rest of the country.
Don’t worry: that giant gavel has two striking faces.
And then make only Obama-Care available to her?
Cruel and unusual punishment – but just imo.
What do you think of Mark Meadows for Speaker?
The likely replacement for an ousted Pelosi might be Rep. Tim Ryan (D), who is far more competent than Pelosi ever was. He’s a high-ranking Democrat who knows who and what lies between the west and east coasts. Republicans/conservatives do not want Ryan.
On the other hand, if Pelosi gets ousted, there is a fair chance the Democrat Party will continue the blindingly stupid decision-making of recent years and choose someone worse for them than Pelosi, hopefully someone quite young so we can enjoy the fruits of their blindness, smugness, and ineptitudes for decades into the future.
(Tim Ryan’s from Ohio, has challenged Pelosi before, and is bad-mouthing her hourly since the GA 06 loss).
Pelosi has deep ties to the Silicon Valley oligarchs who donate heavily to the party. I think after she led them to the historic defeat in 2010, they kept her as Minority Leader for her fundraising prowess. They believed the money she could raise would help them dig out of the hole she put them in.
The vast amount of money raised for this race may have actually backfired. I’ve seen accounts of people who live in GA-6 claim they got sick of all the calls every day; door knockers; and TV ads. I saw one photo of a note someone hung on their door that said “We are convicted felons. We can not vote. Go away.”
“Pelosi has deep ties to the Silicon Valley oligarchs who donate heavily to the party.”
Pelosi is the magnet for fools to who have money to burn by placing it onto the progressive funeral pyre. I don’t care how much money these people raise and spend. It doesn’t scare me. I just see it as people burning their money. So pile it on. The bigger the pile, the more satisfying it is to see it burn.
The idea here is that there is now a vacuum, which Donald Trump is slowly filling.
The rats of the GOPe will try and fill it, instead. Our fight is with those rats.
Back in the Tea Party days, we got rid of our dem congressman by pointing out that his office was right next to Pelosi’s. My sign had a photo of Pelosi with the words: “Heath Schuler, Pelosi’s Boy Toy”. It got a lot of knowing laughs even in Haight-Asheville.