Would Democrats Be Better Off Without Pelosi?

There’s chatter on Twitter (mostly among conservatives) that the source of Democrats’ electoral woes is House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi. The main evidence in support of this claim is that Republicans often attack Democratic Congressional candidates (most recently, GA-06 loser Jon Ossoff), and those candidates have been losing a lot recently.

It may be that it would be best for the Democratic Party if Pelosi retired in 2018. But that Republicans attack Pelosi contributes basically nothing to this argument. Party politics is such that each party will always pick some bogeyman (or, as is often in the case of Republicans seeking a Democratic villain, bogeywoman) to represent the purity of the other side’s evil. Congressional politics are such that this figure will often be in Congressional leadership.

Congressional leaders have to represent their own side’s caucus — as a result, they are politically fairly extreme. Imagine a range from 0 to 1 where 0 represents the most left-wing Democrat and 1 represents the most right-wing Republican. If Democrats are spread roughly evenly from 0 to 1, then a party leader would represent them best by being about a .25.

There’s another factor that pushes party leaders in Congress to be less moderate — they usually come from safe districts. To make your way up to leadership, you have to serve a lot of terms, which means that you probably come from a district that reliably votes for your party. When choosing leaders, party members also want to vote for someone that is unlikely to be unseated. There are some politicians who are reelected many times even though their district is not that partisan (Paul Ryan, for example). But for the most part, leadership comes from the safest districts, and the safest districts are more extreme, meaning that their representatives are more extreme as well.

Party leaders in Congress are therefore almost always unpopular with the general public. A .25 on the ideological scale will look like an extremist to voters who themselves are spread between .5 and 1. Thus if you’re a Republican running in a Republican district, you would do well to suggest that your opponent (say, a moderate Democrat who on the above ideological scale would be close to a .5) is sympathetic to the party leader. Add to this the general unpopularity of Congress, which seeps into the perception of its leaders, of either party, and pure partisan antipathy (even unattached from ideological orientation), and Congressional leaders of both parties are pretty much guaranteed to be objects of hatred. This is one reason it’s rare for successful presidential candidates to come from Congressional leadership (Obama was a senator, but wasn’t there long and never in leadership; LBJ was Senate Majority Leader but his rise to the presidency came through tragedy rather than election; JFK was a senator but not in leadership).

And sure enough, Pelosi is indeed quite unpopular with the general electorate — this YouGov poll has her at -21 (27% favorable, 48% unfavorable), breaking down predictably along partisan lines. Schumer does not fare much better (-14). But Paul Ryan polls almost as poorly (-19). And polling worst of all, consistently the least popular national politician in the United States, is Mitch McConnell (-23).

It’s true that Pelosi has a higher percentage of respondents with a “very unfavorable” view of her (34%), particularly voters of the opposition party (65%). So for a Democrat like Jon Ossoff trying to win over Republican voters, being tied to Pelosi is worse than being tied to, say, Schumer (41% very unfavorable among Republicans). But it’s always going to be someone — if Pelosi retires, someone will take her place, become odious to Republican voters, and every Democrat running in a Republican district will face attacks that they are the mere instrument of this Democratic demon. Even if Republicans somehow run out of Congressional leaders to smear, they can always go back to the Hillary Clinton well, or the state of California, or, no matter how improbably, Al Jazeera. Pelosi’s retirement would not be the end of partisan attack ads.

You don’t hear anyone suggesting that Mitch McConnell should retire because of how unpopular he is. Partly that’s because Democrats have a more prominent and more polarizing figure than McConnell as target for their partisan fire — namely, the President. But it’s also because McConnell’s function is not to win elections for his side, but to find votes and formulate legislative strategy. He’s very good at it. Pelosi is too. In that respect, at least, Pelosi’s retirement would be a significant loss for Democrats.