An exuberantly confident House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said on Tuesday evening that Democrats will take back the House of Representatives next week and told CBS’s Stephen Colbert that she is “very, very proud” to be called a “San Francisco liberal.”
“Well, let me say this. Up until today, I would have said ‘if the election were held today, we would win,” Pelosi said on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. When Colbert asked her “what happened today that changed that,” Pelosi continued, “What I’m now saying is, ‘We will win! We will win! We will win!’”
“We will win. We own the ground,” Pelosi giddily continued. “We’re not yielding one grain of sand.”
When Colbert asked her about Republicans using her as a “cudgel”and “caricature” while criticizing her left-wing San Francisco values, Pelosi embraced the label.
“San Francisco liberal is something that I am very, very proud of,” Pelosi said. “I don’t mind them criticizing me but I do mind them criticizing my city—the city of St. Francis.”
Pelosi, known for her fundraising prowess, said earlier in the year that her district is so far to the left that left-wing voters in her district see her as a “corporate pawn.”
“They spend tens of millions of dollars characterizing me as this left-wing person where in my district they call me a corporate pawn because my district is so progressive,” Pelosi said of GOP campaign attacks featuring her.
Republicans like Rep. Dave Brat (R-VA) have made Pelosi a central issue in their re-election campaigns, with Brat asking voters in his district if they would be comfortable if his challenger Abigail Spanberger (D) became a rubber stamp for Pelosi and her agenda.
“Look at San Francisco, the home of Nancy Pelosi—do you want to turn Richmond into San Francisco?” Brat asked.
Pelosi told Colbert that Republicans try to “demonize” her as a San Francisco liberal before saying that, unlike President Donald Trump, she has thick skin.
“But one thing—there is a big difference the president and me—he has very thin skin and I have very thick skin,” she said.
When Colbert asked how long the curtains are that she is measuring right now, Pelosi said she is not measuring the drapes and Democrats are just “walking precincts.” She predicted Democrats will have an even bigger election night if all of their voters show up to the polls.
“The Democrats will carry the House. If we have a bigger victory, the Senate, governorships. It’s going to be a great night for America,” Pelosi said before later saying the midterm elections will be about “checks and balances.”
Colbert, worried that Pelosi could be dropping the football in celebration before crossing the goal line, kept telling Pelosi to “please don’t say that” to not jinx the Democrats. Colbert added, “I feel like I should sacrifice a goat or something to take the hex off of what you just said.”
When she was Speaker, the San Francisco Democrat rammed Obamacare through the House and infamously said Congress had to pass the bill to find out what was in it. She recently said those who disagree with her party’s economic agenda should suffer some economic “collateral damage,” but she suggested on Tuesday that she was wearing purple on Colbert’s show to symbolize how Democrats will be more unifying than Republicans in the next Congress and lower the temperature of political discourse.
Nancy Pelosi has previously said that just 25,000 votes could decide whether Democrats take back the House.
If Democrats do win back the House, Pelosi, who said Republicans come after her because she is a “very effective” legislator, has said she is confident she will regain her Speakership and indicated that having the gavel and subpoena power will give her “leverage” over Trump in negotiations.
“It’s an interesting dynamic when you have the gavel,” Pelosi recently said at Harvard’s Institute of Politics. “It just makes all the difference in the world and the leverage you have in your conversations.”
Though Pelosi said she will trade nothing to give Trump funds for the border wall, she recently told CNN that subpoena power will be a “great arrow to have in your quiver in terms of negotiating on other subjects.”
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