Pelosi pins House losses on Trump and warns he will be up to post-election ‘mischief’

Speaker’s 2022 prediction is undermined by long history of presidents losing seats during first midterm elections

Speaker Nancy Pelosi is pinning House Democrats’ election losses on “insurmountable” races in competitive districts to Donald Trump being on the ticket as she warned a possibly outgoing president will spend the next three months getting up to “mischief.”

"Our enemies foreign and domestic are making [an] assault on our elections,” she told reporters on Capitol Hill. “Well, we have one domestic."

The California Democrat, who has clashed with the GOP president since he took office, warned he might issue orders to try achieving some long held Republican policy goals.

She also predicted the president might try firing officials within federal agencies.

Pressed about how House Democrats lost seats even as a Democratic nominee appears close to securing the White House, Ms Pelosi again pointed to Trump. She said some incumbent Democrats were running in Trump-friendly parts of the country.

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“What were winning issues my district were not winning issues in other places,” she said of San Francisco.

“We lost some battles … but we have the gavel,” the speaker told reporters as some moderate members of her caucus are blasting her and the progressive wing of the sometimes-fractious caucus for going too hard to the left.

"We lost some battles but we won the war,” she said. “We have the gavel. We have the gavel."

Her comment came after tensions boiled over on a call among House Democrats on Thursday.

“We need to not ever use the word ‘socialist’ or ‘socialism’ ever again. . . . We lost good members because of that,” Virginia Congresswoman Abigail Spanberger said on a recording obtained by media outlets. “If we are classifying Tuesday as a success . . . we will get f---ing torn apart in 2022.”

But Ms Pelosi predicted big gains in two years.

Her premise is House Democrats picked up tens of seats in the 2018 midterms because the president was not on the ballot. His presence on the top of the ticket in some rural races made them “insurmountable,” she claimed.

But he won’t be on the ticket during the 2022 midterms and the speaker expects House Democrats to pick up seats.

That, however, is undermined by history: A sitting first-term chief executive almost always loses seats in one or both chambers during a midterm congressional election.

The speaker did not criticise any of her frustrated members, instead talking of a need to find “common ground,” and saying the likely incoming president can help because “Joe Biden is the great unifier.”