Nancy Pelosi: How She Got the Job Done
Convincing Joe Biden to end his 2024 campaign required the kind of tact, finesse, and steely resolve she has shown repeatedly in her long career.
ON SATURDAY NIGHT, as Democrats were abandoning a sick and sequestered President Biden, Nancy Pelosi stepped up on a small stage in Raleigh to the song “Let’s Give Them Something to Talk About.”
None of the speakers at the North Carolina state party dinner were talking about the saga then playing out in the Democratic party. And Pelosi’s performance was flawless. The former speaker of the House energetically touted the accomplishments of the Biden administration but not the candidacy of the president as she rallied the assembled, bewildered Democrats.
“No wasted time, no underutilized resources, and no regrets the day after the election that we could have done more. Are you ready for a great Democratic victory? I thought so!”
Unknown at the time, Pelosi had spoken with Biden again that day—an 84-year-old woman using her power to urge an 81-year-old man to relinquish his. Her gambit was audacious, pairing a strategic, coordinated public-pressure campaign with a willingness to privately confront a stubborn Biden and continue to cajole him.
Pelosi succeeded because of the trust she worked hard to maintain with Biden in the dramatic days and weeks following his fateful debate. She never publicly called on him to step aside. While Biden reportedly seethed at critics including President Obama—who sidelined him in 2016 so Hillary Clinton could run—Pelosi was talking to Biden about the reality unfolding in the data that threatened the party all the way down the ballot. At the same time, she was fielding complaints from frantic Democrats who believed the party was headed for certain defeat and a second term of Donald Trump just months from now—and she encouraged them to speak up.
The public statements continued and, notably, Pelosi’s fellow Californians made headlines. Rep. Adam Schiff’s call for Biden to drop out, and Rep. Jared Huffman’s organizing of a group letter opposing the Democratic National Committee’s plans to hold a virtual roll call vote to nominate Biden before the convention weren’t subtle.
As Biden dug in, stating repeatedly he was running for re-election, Pelosi went on Morning Joe to warn “time is running short,” treating the crisis as an unresolved matter.
Pelosi has long boasted of her vote-counting prowess and refusal to bring bills to the House floor unless she knew they would pass. Her campaign to get Biden to step down was not going to fail. So she was unflinching in her approach to Biden, a man she knows famously delays decision-making. As one Democrat told Politico: “Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way. . . . She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”
It was a climactic chapter in a legendary career—too late to be included in her memoir, The Art of Power, scheduled for publication just days from now on August 6.
In her two decades as leader of the House Democrats, including four terms as speaker, Pelosi led her party through divisive battles over the Iraq war, the financial crisis of 2008, and the passage of the Affordable Care Act. Members have testified repeatedly to Pelosi’s inclusive management style—everyone gets heard, usually multiple times, and that’s how she knows what they need. She obsesses over objectives, not her reputation.
Pelosi’s exit from leadership at the end of the last Congress was long anticipated, and pent-up demand from younger members waiting in line for the retirements of three top leaders in their eighties made it appear a tumultuous reckoning was imminent. To the surprise of both parties, the transition to Hakeem Jeffries replacing her as Democratic leader was nearly silent, and perfectly airtight—a masterstroke of the great consensus builder.
Once Biden’s debate performance plunged his party into an unprecedented crisis, Pelosi stepped in to fill a void—House and Senate leaders were conflicted, and balancing disparate interests, but Pelosi was not. Mowing through a wall of denial built up by Jill and Hunter Biden, and nurtured by other close aides Pelosi believed were not showing the president accurate polling, could not have been easy or painless. But Pelosi’s focus is unyielding: All that matters is winning.
PELOSI AND MITCH MCCONNELL are often compared as legendary tacticians whose care and feeding of their members help them win, or at least stop their opponents from winning. McConnell is credited with remaking the judiciary, while Pelosi gets credit for passing the Affordable Care Act. Yet McConnell will also be remembered for letting Trump end his career as Senate leader. He could have been the Republican leader who blocked Trump from running for office ever again. Pelosi had the guts to push a president out of a race, while McConnell balked after January 6th, first in slow-walking the timing of Trump’s second Senate impeachment trial, then in refusing to work to convict—or even vote to convict—Trump. That will be the first line of McConnell’s obituary.
Though Pelosi had first expressed a preference for an open convention, likely because she believed the process would strengthen Vice President Kamala Harris in the general election, the speaker emerita was able to help the California delegation put Harris over the top for the requisite number of delegates to make her the presumptive nominee in an emergency Zoom meeting Monday night. It was only forty-eight hours after her final plea in a Saturday phone call with Biden. Pelosi endorsed the vice president with “immense pride and limitless optimism,” and declared, “My enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris for president is official, personal and political.”
It was trademark Pelosi—cheerful and blunt, but also layered. Championing a woman’s rise, but prioritizing victory above all else.
Pelosi likes to say that power isn’t passed along but taken. “No one’s going to give you power. You have to seize it,” she told Susan Page for her biography, Madam Speaker.
The power of Nancy Pelosi has helped reset the campaign, and threatened Trump’s path to victory for the first time in the entire 2024 cycle.
And it may not be her last act. Electing the first woman president of the United States, and preserving democracy, may be next.