Nancy Pelosi is fixated on her battle plan

By Karen Tumulty,

Was it really less than a year ago that Republicans confidently predicted that the impeachment of President Trump would become the overriding issue this election season and cost House Democrats their majority?

“Those who vote yes on today’s articles of impeachment must carry the heavy burden of shame and guilt for as long as they serve in Congress, which won’t be long because the American people will remember in November,” Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) declared last December as the House prepared to pass, along party lines, two articles charging the president with abuse of power and obstruction of Congress over his dealings with Ukraine.

Trump claimed vindication when the Republican-led Senate acquitted him. “We’re going to win a lot of seats,” he predicted at a pep rally afterward at the White House.

But these days, impeachment is rarely mentioned. And House Democrats, rather than being on the defensive, appear likely to expand the majority they won in 2018 by as many as 15 seats, according to the latest estimate by David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.

More than Trump’s unpopularity is at play. While most of the political world has focused on the presidential race and the battle for control of the Senate, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has set a disciplined course for strengthening the Democrats’ grip on the only part of the government that they currently control.

“While I am confident, I’m assuming nothing,” Pelosi told me on Friday. “We haven’t stopped working.”

She has kept her members focused on the concerns of their constituents, especially on health care, the issue that carried them over the finish line two years ago.

Democrats have pounded Republicans for their efforts to dismantle the Affordable Care Act. Less than a week before the impeachment vote, the House passed legislation to lower drug prices by allowing Medicare to negotiate with drug companies. The measure went nowhere in the Senate, where Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) denounced it as “socialist price controls.”

Democratic contenders in the 25 most competitive House districts have clobbered their GOP opponents financially. An analysis by the Center for Responsive Politics found that they raised $109.1 million through the end of September, compared with $66.3 million for the Republicans.

In the third quarter, Pelosi herself raised more than $67 million for Democrats, including $54 million directly for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC). She spoke at 56 virtual fundraising events for candidates, state parties and organizations. The House Majority PAC, which is the largest super PAC aiding House Democrats, is on track to spend $150 million this cycle, triple what it did in the 2018 election.

The map this year should have been a tough one for House Democrats, who are defending 30 seats in districts that Trump won in 2016. Republicans, by comparison, are defending only six in districts that Hillary Clinton carried.

Pelosi has been especially alert to the needs and potential vulnerabilities of her freshman members who come from red-leaning areas. She has appointed an unprecedented 18 first-term lawmakers to subcommittee chairmanships, giving them a chance to shine on issues that matter to their districts in an institution where junior members traditionally were expected to stay silent and wait their turn.

“When new members come to the Congress, those of us who’ve been here a while just look with great admiration and say, ‘Here they come, the fresh recruits. Who among them will lead in this body?’ ” Pelosi told me. “Let us open our institutions, our minds, to any ideas and invigoration that they bring to the Congress. Let us embrace the future in this way.”

This election season has taken some twists that Pelosi could not have anticipated.

In April, the speaker told DCCC Chairwoman Cheri Bustos (D-Ill.) to come up with a plan to retool the operation for the covid-19 pandemic, which made traditional means of campaigning in person unsafe. Pelosi said that Democrats must find other ways to keep their supporters organized and active.

Within a month, “we built from the ground up, from scratch, what we called the Virtual Action Center,” which organized phone banks and get-out-the-vote drives digitally, Bustos said. It has drawn 200,000 volunteers and has reached, by Bustos’s estimate, 30 million people in battleground districts.

Pelosi predicted that Tuesday will be a very good day for Democrats up and down the ballot. “I can only speak in the moment, and in the moment, I believe we will win it all. The White House for sure. Of course the House and the Senate,” she said.

And if that’s the case, she noted, it will be Democratic House members who paved the way by taking back the chamber in 2018: “We were left to our own devices. No president in the White House, just us. And we said, ‘We know how to win.’ ”

She also knows how to make a heavy lift look easy.

Read more: Karen Tumulty: Nancy Pelosi’s unlikely rise Paul Waldman: Republicans can’t make Nancy Pelosi the villain anymore Jennifer Rubin: The new Congress will probably be more Democratic — and more moderate The Ranking Committee: Here’s who the power rankers think are going to win — everything David Byler and Alyssa Rosenberg: The ultimate survival guide to election night and beyond, in 17 questions and answers