House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a new interview that Democrats aren’t playing up plans to help the poor because voters don’t care about the less fortunate.
“It’s not a winning issue in the campaigns,” Pelosi told “Rolling Stone” magazine in an article published late Sunday ahead of the 2018 midterm elections. “People don’t want to care about poor people. They want to care about themselves. So it’s a middle-income message.”
She added that while addressing things like child poverty is “in our DNA,” she said it is “not in our talking points.
Pelosi said she tries to instill a message in Democratic candidates she works with that “it’s not about you — it’s about the one in five children in America who live in poverty.”
“That’s what it’s about. That’s my purpose,” she said.
Pelosi said she was hopeful about the 2018 election cycle, even though Republicans are making gains in recent congressional generic ballots.
RealClearPolitics’ poll aggregate on Monday handed House and Senate Democrats a 6 percentage-point advantage over their GOP counterparts, a marked improvement from December 2017, when Democrats were ahead by 13 percentage points.
“We’re in a very good place,” Pelosi said.
