Nancy Pelosi's Reign of Error
by Jay Cost, Contributing Editor
| September 17, 2020 11:00 PM
Nancy Pelosi made news late last month, and not in a good way. She was caught on a security camera having her hair done at a San Francisco salon that has been closed to the public during the coronavirus lockdown. When confronted with the footage, she did not apologize for the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do impression, but rather expressed outrage at the salon owner for setting her up.
If you have followed Pelosi’s career over the past 15 or so years, the whole affair was hardly a surprise. Pelosi is one of the most unpopular figures in the last decade of American politics. According to RealClearPolitics, her average favorability rating stands at just 38%, compared to a 52% unfavorable rating — numbers that are worse than President Trump's at the time of writing. Pelosi’s numbers have been this poor for quite some time. In January 2007, shortly after she was first sworn in as speaker of the House, an ABC News/ Washington Post poll found Pelosi enjoying a 54% favorable rating, compared to a 25% unfavorable rating. But last fall, the ABC/ Post poll found her approval rating at just 38%, roughly in line with where her numbers in RealClearPolitics are today.
Congressional leaders often struggle with this kind of broad unpopularity. The same ABC/ Post poll from last fall had Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell with just a 25% approval rating, compared to 51% disapproval. Likewise, Harry Reid, the former Democratic leader of the Senate, usually had net-negative approval ratings when he was in office, as did former Republican Speakers John Boehner and Paul Ryan. It goes with the turf: Congress as an institution is widely disliked, but voters tend to approve of their own representatives, so the public usually focuses its ire upon the leaders of the institution.
What makes Pelosi unique, at least among leaders of recent memory, is the persistence of disapproval across time. She was broadly disliked in 2010, just as she is broadly disliked a decade later. Much of that can be chalked up, ironically enough, to her own unique political acumen. She has managed to maintain her leadership of the House Democratic caucus, and so has remained the face of her party in Congress, which means that she, unlike, say, Ryan or Boehner, has been consistently disliked.
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