To hear the GOP copywriters tell it, Democrats are weak on crime. They support an open border. Inflation is all their fault. And they’re stoking absurd fears that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy.
If there’s something negative to say about Democrats, voters in competitive districts will likely hear it on one of the ads playing around the clock less than a week before Election Day.
But for all the attacks, there’s one charge that’s lost its luster, the one that accuses vulnerable Democrats of being in cahoots with the worst Democrat of all: the one, the only, Nancy Pelosi.
The former speaker has been fielding national attacks for more than a decade. In 2010, Republicans launched the “Fire Pelosi” campaign after the passage of the Affordable Care Act. In 2018, the GOP hammered Pelosi as a liberal with “San Francisco values.” Even in 2022 — when Pelosi was widely rumored to be giving up the gavel — the National Republican Congressional Committee and Congressional Leadership Fund rolled out more than three dozen ads accusing lawmakers of being in Pelosi’s pocket.
But the flood of GOP ads on Pelosi has finally slowed to a trickle. And there’s a certain sadness for the Republicans who have devoted tens of millions of dollars for over a decade to building up Pelosi as their archnemesis.
“In some ways, when she’s gone, they will miss her a lot,” former Rep. Steve Stivers, who chaired the NRCC in 2018, told NOTUS. “She was a name that had been in politics a long time that people recognized.”
Berating Pelosi just doesn’t pack the same punch these days. Although she’s no longer helming the House Democratic caucus, one of the chief architects of the “Fire Pelosi” campaign in 2010, GOP operative Doug Heye, said the Pelosi-centric ads “could still be used in some fashion.”
“But at this point,” he told NOTUS, “we’ve got a nominee and an incumbent president that are both unpopular, and that’s where Republicans are going to focus.”
Exhibit A: Rep. Don Bacon is running in a bruising reelection bid in a swing district and noted that Pelosi is “not their leader anymore.”
“I haven’t mentioned her at all,” he told NOTUS.
Pelosi might not be leading Democrats, but she’s not retired. She’s still serving in Congress, recently published a book — and completed a high-profile publicity tour — while also being active on the campaign trail for her former constituent, Vice President Kamala Harris. Yesterday, she stood by her husband, Paul, as his attacker was sentenced to life in prison.
But ever since Pelosi officially left leadership in 2023, her de jure power has diminished.
Her de facto power, however, remains potent. She’s been widely credited with pulling the political levers that led to Joe Biden withdrawing his reelection bid, and she’s remained an undeniable power broker in the Democratic Party.
In many ways, she’s still an ideal target. When asked about the efficacy of bashing Pelosi on the trail, the National Republican Congressional Committee leapt at the chance to do just that — bash Pelosi.
“Nancy Pelosi’s unpopularity is timeless,” NRCC Communications Director Jack Pandol said in a statement to NOTUS, “a toxic stew of San Francisco radicalism mixed with coastal elitism that turns off voters everywhere.”
It was a similar story from CLF spokesperson Courtney Parella. “Nancy Pelosi remains one of the most toxic and disliked politicians nationwide. Swing voters uniquely dislike her and view her as far more liberal than they are,” she said.
Trump also hasn’t let go of his long-simmering fixation on Pelosi either. Just last week, he called her part of “the enemy within.”
When the opportunity arises, the GOP campaign arm still seizes on links between the former speaker and frontline Democrats. In mid-September, the NRCC blasted California Democratic candidate Will Rollins for calling Pelosi “the greatest speaker of all time.” CLF also rolled out a similar ad.
“Voters believe she still pulls all the strings,” Republican strategist Lance Trover told NOTUS. “Think about it: She single-handedly tossed a sitting president out of the way. It’s the exact kind of thing that turns off voters.”
Pelosi’s office declined comment, but Pelosi allies contended that the attacks only contributed to her mystique — and her fundraising prowess.
“We would literally send out emails, ‘I’m under attack,’” former top Pelosi aide Drew Hammill told NOTUS. “I never understood it. She’s an Italian grandmother of nine. You can try to caricature her as much as you want, but at the end of the day, she became increasingly more known.”
For years, the ads were leveled at Pelosi ally Rep. Dan Kildee. He said they never got under his skin — or under Pelosi’s.
“I can say without exaggeration, not one time did anybody ever say, ‘Oh, you really need to answer that attack ad with Nancy Pelosi,’” Kildee told NOTUS. “They would say about other stuff, you know, about taxes, about the border, about whatever. Never would they say something like, ‘You’re too close to Nancy Pelosi.’”
While the “Fire Pelosi” campaign was a fundraising juggernaut in 2010 (by 2010 standards), Stivers himself acknowledged that the ads fell flat in 2018.
“Even when we tried it in the ’18 cycle, it’s interesting, when you’re not speaker, people forget what they think about you,” he said. “And it’s not nearly as intense.”
Even if it’s true that the biennial assaults on Pelosi backfired to make her an even more formidable operator, linking opponents to some Big Bad leader is a classic political maneuver. House Democrats are deploying precisely that approach with Trump and, to a lesser extent, Speaker Mike Johnson.
The current leader of the Democratic caucus, however, doesn’t appear to be a strong contender to fill the GOP’s chief bogeyman opening. “Republicans have not — through CLF or NRCC — had a lot of ads attacking Hakeem Jeffries,” Stivers also noted, “because most Americans don’t really know him.”
This spring, Axios reported that an American Action Network survey of 84 districts showed 40% of voters hadn’t heard of the minority leader. Kildee, a top Jeffries confidant, said, “Hakeem is a more difficult target. Just his personal style is not one that invites that kind of attack.”
Jeffries has largely stayed out of the spotlight. Known for being “ready, willing and able” to stay on message, he hasn’t inspired quite the same virality or vitriol as Pelosi.
So, if not Jeffries, who will take on the mantle of Republicans’ top antagonist?
Occasionally, GOP ads raise progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, whose brand has become inextricably linked with left-wing programs that the GOP loves to highlight. A September CLF ad attempted to tie Ocasio-Cortez’s so-called “radical agenda” to Democratic candidate Mondaire Jones. But she’s hardly the only Democrat on Republican minds.
“You have a lot of members now who proactively want to be the other party’s bogeyman,” Heye said. “That’s a badge of honor for some of them. Doesn’t have to be the speaker anymore.”
As Republicans search for a worthy adversary, they still have Pelosi on their mind. As Kildee put it: “When it comes to Republicans, they love to hate her, but they can’t deny the fact they respect her.”
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Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman are reporters at NOTUS.