Pelosi ‘Very Confident’ Democrats Will Retain House in 2022 Midterms

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is seen at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, on June 28, 2021. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) on Friday said she believes Democrats will keep their majority in the House of Representatives in the 2022 midterms, dismissing poll numbers and internal warnings that the GOP will take over.

“I’m very confident that we will win the House,” Pelosi told reporters Friday in response to a question about Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney’s (D-N.Y.) internal presentation showing that if the midterms were held today, Democrats would lose the majority.

Pelosi dismissed news reports predicting losses for Democrats and said that “there are several scenarios here,” while saying that “you never [campaign] from the best-case scenario.” Maloney’s presentation was “one of” those scenarios, Pelosi said.

“'I’m very confident that we will win the house,” Pelosi concluded.

Tim Persico, executive director of the Maloney-chaired Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), confirmed to Politico on Tuesday that Maloney (D-N.Y.), the chair of the DCCC, shared data with incumbents showing that Democrats could face possible losses next year.

“We are not afraid of this data … We’re not trying to hide this,” Persico told the news outlet. “If [Democrats] use it, we’re going to hold the House. That’s what this data tells us, but we gotta get in action,” he added.

Historically, the party that wins a presidential election typically suffers losses in at least one chamber of Congress during the subsequent midterm elections. And in 2020, Republicans made strong gains in the House after losing the majority in 2018—two years after former President Donald Trump’s 2016 victory.

Two Republicans in early May also advanced in a special runoff election as the top two vote-getters for Texas’s 6th Congressional District—with no Democrats advancing.

One of the losing Democrat candidates in early May issued a warning following her defeat, saying that the midterms “could be a major setback” for Democrats in the House.

“On Saturday, Republican candidates got 62 percent of the vote to 38 percent for Democrats (R+25). All the things I thought would motivate Democrats, such as the attempted violent overthrow of a legitimate election result, along with Snowmaggedeon … failed to get our voters out,” Democrat Jana Lynne Sanchez wrote at the time after finishing in third place.

Currently, House Republicans would need to net five seats in the 435-member chamber to reclaim the majority. For some incumbent Democrats in centrist districts, some voters are more likely to oppose messaging from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

But Pelosi stressed that Democrat lawmakers “have their own connections to their own districts” and used the party’s messaging on lowering healthcare costs, cleaning up government corruption, and the economy.

“We always want to be cautious,” Pelosi also said. Maloney’s message to the incumbents last week, she argued, was, “Always run scared.”