as she tirelessly crisscrossed the country. My daughter, a Pelosi-appointed Ca Dem delegate, worked everyday on GOTV for Red to Blue here in SF in the lead up to the election, so I did get a small glimpse behind the scenes, and Nancy Pelosi seemed to be working non-stop and very effectively to ensure this result. I listened into a couple of briefings (sometimes my daughter participated in these at the office, but other times she participated at home, listening to the briefing on speaker phone) as Leader Pelosi was galvanizing the troops, with representatives from different GOTV organizations reporting in from around the country. She funded the San Francisco Red to Blue headquarters, where a gazillion volunteers made countless calls and sent countless texts to GOTV on behalf of candidates like Josh Harder who just flipped CA 10. I don't know how much she raised for each specific race, but I've included a snippet from a CNN piece about the "eye-popping" amount of money she raised for this election cycle. An Atlantic Monthly snippet (below) includes a quote from Politico calling her “the most successful nonpresidential political fundraiser in U.S. history," and a quote from Thomas Mann, who studies Congress at the Brookings Institution, calling her the “strongest and most effective speaker of modern times.”
https://hoodline.com/2018/09/with-election-day-weeks-away-castro-debuts-red-to-blue-office-for-democratic-volunteers
https://www.cnn.com/2018/08/15/politics/nancy-pelosi-fundraising-democrats/index.html
Through June, Pelosi had raised an eye-popping $83 million for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee for the 2018 election cycle, more than double the next closest Democrat, according to an internal list for the group charged with electing more Democrats to the US House of Representatives. A source briefed on the matter said that through July she had raised nearly $91 million for the party committee, which is spending big in hotly contested races including where Democratic candidates are running away from Pelosi.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/04/the-nancy-pelosi-problem/554048/
The Nancy Pelosi Problem
The first female speaker of the House has become the most effective congressional leader of modern times—and, not coincidentally, the most vilified.
PETER BEINART, APRIL 2018
Last may, The Washington Post’s James Hohmann noted “an uncovered dynamic” that helped explain the GOP’s failure to repeal Obamacare. Three current Democratic House members had opposed the Affordable Care Act when it first passed. Twelve Democratic House members represent districts that Donald Trump won. Yet none voted for repeal. The “uncovered dynamic,” Hohmann suggested, was Nancy Pelosi’s skill at keeping her party in line.
She’s been keeping it in line for more than a decade. In 2005, George W. Bush launched his second presidential term with an aggressive push to partially privatize Social Security. For nine months, Republicans demanded that Democrats admit the retirement system was in crisis and offer their own program to change it. Pelosi refused. Democratic members of Congress hosted more than 1,000 town-hall meetings to rally opposition to privatization. That fall, Republicans backed down, and Bush’s second term never recovered.
In 2009, Pelosi persuaded deficit-wary Blue Dog Democrats to back Barack Obama’s stimulus package, and it passed without a single Republican vote. The following year, when Rahm Emanuel, then the White House chief of staff, suggested scaling back health-care reform after the Democrats’ surprise Senate loss in Massachusetts, Pelosi insisted that Obama maintain his goal of universal coverage. She enraged her pro-choice allies by allowing a vote on an amendment prohibiting women insured through the law’s health-care exchanges from receiving government-subsidized abortions. But that gave antiabortion Democrats cover to support the bill, which passed with nary a Republican vote.
These victories led Thomas Mann, who studies Congress at the Brookings Institution, to call Pelosi the “strongest and most effective speaker of modern times.” And even after being relegated to minority leader when Republicans took the House in 2010, she kept winning legislative fights. In the summer of 2015, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and the Republican Party launched a mammoth lobbying campaign to kill Obama’s nuclear agreement with Iran. Pelosi quickly secured the votes to prevent Republicans from overturning the agreement, thus checkmating the deal’s foes.
In addition to being a masterful legislative tactician, the 77-year-old Pelosi is, in Politico’s words, “the most successful nonpresidential political fundraiser in U.S. history.” ... One might think grassroots Democratic enthusiasm for Pelosi would offset her lack of appeal among Republicans and independents. The party, after all, is moving left, where Pelosi has been all along. She opposed Bill Clinton’s attempt to allow China into the World Trade Organization; she opposed Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, his policy that prevented LGBT Americans from serving openly in the military; she opposed the Iraq War when most of the House Democratic leadership, and almost every Democratic senator running for president, supported it; and she opposed Obama’s push for the fast-track trade authority necessary to finalize the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Yet a September CNN poll found that Democrats were only 11 points more likely to view Pelosi favorably than unfavorably.
Gender scholars would not be surprised. For a 2010 paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, the Yale researchers Victoria Brescoll and Tyler Okimoto showed study participants the fictional biographies of two state senators, identical except that one was named John Burr and the other Ann Burr. (I referred to this study in an October 2016 article for this magazine called “Fear of a Female President.”) When quotations were added that described the state senators as “ambitious” and possessing “a strong will to power,” John Burr became more popular. But the changes provoked “moral outrage” toward Ann Burr, whom both men and women became less willing to support....
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