Things are not looking good for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.
Between centrist and far-left Democratic candidates publicly declaring their opposition to her speakership and a new survey showing a significant number of Democrats think she should be replaced, the congresswoman’s tenure as a party leader may actually be in jeopardy.
Asked whether Democratic leaders in the House should “keep Nancy Pelosi,” an impressive 49 percent of Democrats said the party should “elect someone else,” according to an American Barometer survey released this week by Hill.TV and HarrisX.
[Related: It’s not just centrists: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez dodges on Nancy Pelosi]
About 79 percent of independents agreed Democrats should “elect someone else,” while 91 percent of surveyed Republicans said the same (who are the other 9 percent?).
About 51 percent of surveyed Democrats, on the other hand, said the party should “keep Nancy Pelosi.”
However, these numbers decline precipitously when the survey administrators reworded the question to include that Pelosi has been the leader of Democrats in the House of Representatives since 2002.
With the rewording, the survey found that only 44 percent of self-identified Democrats said the party ought to “keep Nancy Pelosi.” Only 13 percent of surveyed Republicans and 31 percent of independents said the same.
About 87 percent of Republicans said Democrats should “elect someone else,” while 69 percent of independents agreed. About 56 percent of Democrats agreed party leadership should appoint someone new.
The minority leader’s office downplayed the results this week, saying the poll was “designed to generate a negative result for Leader Pelosi.”
The survey’s findings come in the same week that Democratic congressional candidate Rashida Tlaib, who’s running for Michigan’s 13th District, said she likely won’t vote for Pelosi as speaker, making her simply the latest in a growing list of Democratic candidates to say so.
Honestly, this could go either way for Pelosi. She is remarkably politically savvy and she knows how to weather a storm. But there’s only so much you can do to quell uprisings at the grass-roots level, especially if it’s a long, sustained revolt. It can be dealt with, sure, but it can also be all-consuming. You can deal with it for only so long before exhaustion sets in. Just ask former House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
HarrisX CEO Dritan Nesho said in reaction to the group’s survey, “Democrats are split on whether to keep Nancy Pelosi as leader and independents and most voter groups want someone else to step up. The findings suggest a yearning for change.”
Anna Greenberg of the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner said in reference to the GOP’s attempts to tie Democratic candidates to Pelosi, “She’s been sort of the boogeyman for some time.”
“I’m skeptical that those ads really work so I think that even though Nancy Pelosi is unpopular, I have never seen a lot of strong evidence in congressional races that calling these people Pelosi Democrats has actually had all that much impact on what actually happens,” she added.
The American Barometer survey, which was conducted online between August 3-4 and surveyed 1,021 registered voters has sampling margin of error of plus or minus 3.07 percentage points.
