Nancy Pelosi Won Her Leadership Race By The Narrowest Margin In Decades
By Clare Malone
Filed under Congress
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday.
SUSAN WALSH / AP
There isn’t typically a whole lot of ink spilled over House leadership elections. But 2016, superlative in all things, most especially chaos, has seen a bit of a ruckus over the Democrats’ vote.
While Nancy Pelosi won re-election to her minority leader position for the Democrats on Wednesday, it was the most contested party leadership race in years, with Rep. Tim Ryan, a 43-year-old from the Mahoning Valley in Ohio, mounting a longshot challenge. He wasn’t successful, but Ryan managed to leech a significant amount of support from Pelosi; she won with only 68 percent of the vote. Since the 102nd Congress began in 1991, the closest Democratic vote had been in the 112th Congress (2011), when Pelosi won the leadership election with 89.6 percent of the vote. (We used data available to us on votes, beginning with the 102nd Congress.)
Minority party support for the House minority leader
Representatives who did not vote for their party’s consensus choice included ones who voted for another member, voted “present” or did not vote at all. Not all the representatives who abstained from voting were deliberate “defections.”
By the standards of House leadership elections, Pelosi won in a squeaker.
Ryan’s entrance into the race marked a significant spot of pique among congressional Democrats eager to shake up the party’s messaging to appeal to white working-class voters in the industrial Midwest, many of whom voted for Donald Trump. Ryan’s district, which Trump carried — a fact Pelosi gleefully pointed out in the run-up to the election — is home to many of those voters. Ryan had played up his blue-collar bona fides in the run-up to the leadership election, saying in a recent interview that the 2018 election is “not going to be won at fundraisers on the coasts — it’s going to be won in union halls in the industrial Midwest and fish fries in the Midwest and the South.”
Pelosi represents a wealthy San Francisco district, and she is known as a powerful fundraising force within the party. By contrast, Ryan’s district is struggling. Just a day after the presidential election, General Motors announced that it would be laying off 2,000 employees at a plant in his district, as well as in Lansing, Michigan.
Though Pelosi prevailed, the weakness of her victory might well mark the emergence of a coalition of more populist Democrats, carved from the same demographic cloth of the “Reagan Democrats” of the past. Ryan is steeped in this tradition, having served as an aide to and succeeded populist Rep. Jim Traficant, notorious for his corruption scandals and something of a proto-Trump personality in political life, down to the imaginative coiffure.
Pelosi spoke to reporters shortly after the vote. “We know how to win elections,” she said. “We’ve done it in the past, we will do it again.
Nancy Pelosi Won Her Leadership Race By The Narrowest Margin In Decades
By Clare Malone
Filed under Congress
House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi speaks to reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington on Wednesday.
SUSAN WALSH / AP
There isn’t typically a whole lot of ink spilled over House leadership elections. But 2016, superlative in all things, most especially chaos, has seen a bit of a ruckus over the Democrats’ vote.
While Nancy Pelosi won re-election to her minority leader position for the Democrats on Wednesday, it was the most contested party leadership race in years, with Rep. Tim Ryan, a 43-year-old from the Mahoning Valley in Ohio, mounting a longshot challenge. He wasn’t successful, but Ryan managed to leech a significant amount of support from Pelosi; she won with only 68 percent of the vote. Since the 102nd Congress began in 1991, the closest Democratic vote had been in the 112th Congress (2011), when Pelosi won the leadership election with 89.6 percent of the vote. (We used data available to us on votes, beginning with the 102nd Congress.)
Minority party support for the House minority leader
Representatives who did not vote for their party’s consensus choice included ones who voted for another member, voted “present” or did not vote at all. Not all the representatives who abstained from voting were deliberate “defections.”
By the standards of House leadership elections, Pelosi won in a squeaker.
Ryan’s entrance into the race marked a significant spot of pique among congressional Democrats eager to shake up the party’s messaging to appeal to white working-class voters in the industrial Midwest, many of whom voted for Donald Trump. Ryan’s district, which Trump carried — a fact Pelosi gleefully pointed out in the run-up to the election — is home to many of those voters. Ryan had played up his blue-collar bona fides in the run-up to the leadership election, saying in a recent interview that the 2018 election is “not going to be won at fundraisers on the coasts — it’s going to be won in union halls in the industrial Midwest and fish fries in the Midwest and the South.”
Pelosi represents a wealthy San Francisco district, and she is known as a powerful fundraising force within the party. By contrast, Ryan’s district is struggling. Just a day after the presidential election, General Motors announced that it would be laying off 2,000 employees at a plant in his district, as well as in Lansing, Michigan.
Though Pelosi prevailed, the weakness of her victory might well mark the emergence of a coalition of more populist Democrats, carved from the same demographic cloth of the “Reagan Democrats” of the past. Ryan is steeped in this tradition, having served as an aide to and succeeded populist Rep. Jim Traficant, notorious for his corruption scandals and something of a proto-Trump personality in political life, down to the imaginative coiffure.
Pelosi spoke to reporters shortly after the vote. “We know how to win elections,” she said. “We’ve done it in the past, we will do it again.
Nancy Pelosi Won Her Leadership Race By The Narrowest Margin In Decades
at anyone thinking this ohio twerp was competing with this.
i spent the whole primary cheering bernie and if it was up to me, bernie would be the president. right now
for a minute.
Pelosi has to have some dirt on alot of them....thats the only thing that would explain this...its either blackmail or money
this fakkit napoleon talking about fundraising like it benefits him 
