House Speaker Nancy Pelosi predicted Friday that Democrats will retain control of the House in 2022 despite projections of a GOP takeover.
“I’m very confident that we will win the House,” Pelosi said Friday during her weekly Capitol news conference.
Pelosi’s comments came in response to reports that even the Democrats’ campaign chief warned that if elections were held now, Republicans would win back the House.
Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), told a closed-door lunch last week that the party needs to course-correct ahead of 2022 to better promote President Biden’s agenda or else they’ll lose, Politico reported.
Pelosi has the slimmest of majorities right now with 220 Democrats to 212 Republicans and three vacancies. Republicans are bullish about winning back the House, and they have history on their side.
The party in power in the White House traditionally loses seats in Congress during the first midterm election. Former President Barack Obama famously suffered a self-described “shellacking” in 2010 after Republicans won in a landslide midterm election and retook the House just two years after his historic White House win.