Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives, speaks to the media during the UNFCCC COP27 climate conference on November 11, 2022 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt.
Sean Gallup | Getty Images
As states across the country continue to count votes in a tight battle for control of the House of Representatives, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats “haven’t given up.”
“Whatever the outcome, we’re on the path to taking our country to a better place than was being dragged down by the other side,” she told ABC’s “This Week” Sunday.
NBC estimates Republicans could win 219 House seats once all uncalled races are settled — barely more than the 218 needed to take the majority — while Democrats could win 216. The projection carries a margin of error of plus-or-minus four seats.
Democrats held their razor-thin majority in the U.S. Senate, NBC News projected Saturday, staving off a full-bore effort by Republicans to leverage economic volatility and public discontent into control of the upper chamber of Congress.
Republicans had hoped, and many had openly anticipated, a “red wave” would wash Democrats out of their majorities in both branches of the legislature.
“Who would have thought two months ago that this ‘red wave’ would turn into a little, tiny trickle, if that at all,” Pelosi, a Democrat who is second in the line of presidential succession, told CNN’s “State of the Union” Sunday.
Pelosi said she has also been told that midterm voters were swayed by the Republican party’s response to the violent attack on her husband, Paul Pelosi, last month.
A California man, David DePape, broke into the couple’s San Francisco home, wielded a hammer and was prepared to kidnap and break the kneecaps of Nancy Pelosi, federal prosecutors revealed in a criminal complaint.
Nancy Pelosi was in Washington, D.C., at the time of the break-in, but her husband Paul, 82, was left with a skull fracture and serious injuries to his right arm and hands.
While many members of Congress were quick to express their support and well wishes to the couple, several Republicans shared misinformation and conspiracy theories about the attack. In a since-deleted tweet, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-La.), who sits on the House Homeland Security Committee, suggested the attacker was a “nudist hippie male prostitute.”
Pelosi told ABC her husband is “improving” and having “one good day after another,” but she told CNN that the trauma of the attack was “intensified” by the Republicans’ “ridiculous, disrespectful attitude.”
“It wasn’t just the attack, it was the Republican reaction to it, which was disgraceful,” she told CNN.
DePape, 42, was charged with the federal crimes of attempted kidnapping of a federal official and assaulting an immediate family member of a United States official with the intent to retaliate against the official. He has pleaded not guilty.
