“He didn’t even carry his district for Hillary Clinton,” Nancy Pelosi dismissively said of her failed rival for minority leader, Rep. Tim Ryan.
It’s harder to imagine someone missing the point more completely.
Only about one in 10 House Democrats in the 115th Congress will come from Trump country, according to data from Five-Thirty-Eight’s Harry Enten. Enten tweets that about 18 Democrats are in districts Trump won or tied. Tim Ryan is one of them, and Pelosi thinks that is a negative.
Follow her logic and it reveals a vision of purity rather than inclusion: Democrats shouldn’t be led by people who get lots of votes from Trump voters.
Maybe she thinks there’s no such thing as a good Trump voter, as liberal writer Jamelle Bouie puts it. I think she’s infected with a bit of elite identity politics — the same politics we saw Democrats exhibit in the Maryland Senate primary where party leadership lined up behind Chris Van Hollen, the scion of a foreign service family representing the wealthiest most educated people in America. I think Romney showed this same quirk in badmouthing the “47 percent.”
Democrats agreed with Pelosi and voted Wednesday morning to keep her on as minority leader despite the party’s major losses under her leadership. As Ryan put it, “We lost 68 seats since 2010, we have the lowest number in our caucus since 1929.”
Some say Pelosi’s a more fitting leader because she’s more representative of the party. That’s true insofar as the Democratic Party under her leadership has retreated to urban, coastal and wealthy districts like her San Francisco district.
Democrats voted today to purify rather than expand.
Timothy P. Carney, the Washington Examiner’s senior political columnist, can be contacted at [email protected]. His column appears Tuesday and Thursday nights on washingtonexaminer.com.
