Pelosi vows House will promote its own ‘non-menacing’ 2020 agenda regardless of presidential nominee

Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Thursday that House Democrats will run on their own policy agenda in the lead-up to November, even if it means breaking from the platform of the party’s presidential nominee.

The issue of 2020 messaging has come under the spotlight with the surging campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), a liberal icon whose left-leaning platform — including policies like “Medicare For All” and the Green New Deal — has energized progressive Democrats but has also sparked waves of panic among more centrist lawmakers fighting for reelection in battleground districts.

Appearing to choose her words carefully, Pelosi said Democrats won control of the House in 2018 by pursuing a liberal but “non-menacing” policy agenda, and will press a similar message this year.

“I’ve been very clear in all of this: Our responsibility is to win the House,” Pelosi said during a press briefing in the Capitol. “We know how to win. We’ve demonstrated that in the most gerrymandered voter-suppressed political arena you could name. And we gained 40 seats in the last election, by owning the ground with our mobilization — not yielding one grain of sand; by a message of a bold, progressive agenda that was mainstream and non-menacing; and having the money, the ends, to advance our cause with our message and our ground game.”

Sanders, a self-described democratic socialist, has spent decades on Capitol Hill — in both the House and Senate — pressing an agenda focused largely on economic and social justice. The unapologetic anti-corporate message has won him millions of enthusiastic followers around the country, who have propelled him to the front of the pack of the dwindling Democratic primary field heading into next week’s crucial Super Tuesday primaries.

And even some on-the-fence Democratic lawmakers have said the energy generated by Sanders’s populist message can’t be ignored.

“We all have to consider that popular appeal,” the lawmaker told The Hill. “There is an energy that we cannot overlook.”

Yet other moderates have a decidedly different view, wary that a Sanders nomination would be an anchor on down-ballot Democrats in contested districts. Many lawmakers are holding out hope for a late surge from a more moderate primary contender, warning that a Sanders nomination could put the House at risk.

“It’s just our obligation to really think hard about that, because so much is riding on it,” said Rep. David Price (D-N.C.), who endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden earlier this week.

Pelosi, a San Francisco liberal, has a long track record supporting policies championed by Sanders, including a single-payer system and much tougher environmental protections. But she also played a crucial role in enacting ObamaCare in 2010, and has since argued the need to strengthen that law, rather than pushing for a universal expansion of Medicare.

She has also scoffed at the Green New Deal, referring to it as “the green dream — or whatever they call it.”

On Thursday, she did not mention the policies that have divided Democrats, projecting instead a face of party unity.

“Our responsibility is to make sure that those who [were] elected last time return to Congress, keep the majority, and add to our numbers,” she said.

“The presidential is its own race, and contrary to what you may be hearing or writing, we are all unified,” she added. “Whoever the nominee is of our party, we will wholeheartedly support.”

Pelosi’s remarks came shortly before Democrats were scheduled to huddle at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee (DNC), just a hop away from Capitol Hill, to discuss the rules surrounding the superdelegates who will vote to formalize the party’s nomination at July’s convention in Milwaukee.

A number of Democrats have grumbled that new DNC rules, adopted after the 2016 cycle, have diminished the powers of sitting lawmakers to influence the process. The issue has emerged as a prominent sticking point as Democrats contemplate a scenario in which Sanders has a plurality of support heading into the convention, but not an outright majority.

Only Sanders, among the primary field, has endorsed the idea that the candidate leading the pack at that point should be handed the nomination, even if that figure has not secured the superdelegate majority. And Pelosi on Thursday, while downplaying the significance of the DNC meeting, also emphasized that Democrats will rally behind the candidate who receives the majority.

“Don’t read too much into it. … It’s really just a reading of the rules,” she said. “And the rules are very clear: the person who will be nominated for president will be the person who will have the majority of the votes.”