House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blamed Republican-funded attacks for her low approval ratings Wednesday, moments after Democrats re-elected her to head the party as minority leader in next year’s Congress.
“How would your ratings be if $75 million were spent against you?” Pelosi said, after being asked about her low approval ratings.
An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll taken at the end of October found that only eight percent of independents have a favorable view of Pelosi and just 24 percent of the general population approves of her job as Speaker. In the waning days of the 111th Congress, 73 percent disprove Congress as a whole, according to the Real Clear Politics poll average.
When asked why she decided to run for another term in party leadership despite the low ratings, she replied, “Because I’m an effective leader. Because we got the job done on health care and Wall Street reform and consumer protections. The list goes on. Because they know that I’m the person that can attract the resources both intellectual and otherwise to take us to victory because I have done it before.”
Republican and conservative groups launched an assault on the two-term Speaker in the months leading up to the mid-term elections, which ultimately gave the GOP a wide majority in the House and narrowed Democratic control of the Senate. The Republican National Committee sponsored a “Fire Pelosi” tour that took Chairman Michael Steele and other activists across the country, dozens of Republican (and even Democratic) political television ads vilified her during the midterm campaign, and billboards from coast-to-coast portrayed her as a puppet-master of Democratic candidates.
“So again,” she went on. “You take nine and a half percent unemployment…$75 million spent against one person and I’d like to see what your ratings would be.”