There isn’t typically a whole lot of ink spilled over House leadership elections. But 2016, superlative in all things, most especially chaos, has seen a bit of a ruckus over the Democrats’ vote.
While Nancy Pelosi won re-election to her minority leader position for the Democrats on Wednesday, it was the most contested party leadership race in years, with Rep. Tim Ryan, a 43-year-old from the Mahoning Valley in Ohio, mounting a longshot challenge. He wasn’t successful, but Ryan managed to leech a significant amount of support from Pelosi; she won with only 68 percent of the vote. Since Pelosi was first elected minority leader in the 108th congress in 2003, the closest Democratic vote had been in the 112th Congress (2011), when Pelosi won the leadership election with 71.3 percent of the vote.
| CONGRESS | START YEAR | SHARE OF PARTY VOTE | PARTY MEMBERS NOT VOTING FOR PELOSI | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 108 | 2003 | 86.3% | 29 | |
| 109 | 2005 | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 110 | 2007 | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 111 | 2009 | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 112 | 2011 | 77.7 | 43 | |
| 113 | 2013 | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 114 | 2015 | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 115 | 2017 | 68.0 | 63 |
By the standards of party leadership elections, Pelosi won in a squeaker. These types of elections take place in closed sessions and only the total vote is reported, not that of individual members. Votes for House speaker, in contrast, are public and take place in the House chamber at the beginning of each session of Congress. During these votes for speaker, members of the minority party traditionally cast symbolic votes for their party’s leader. That vote hasn’t happened yet for the 115th Congress, but for comparison, these votes — like internal party leadership elections — tend to be lopsided. (We used data available to us on votes, beginning with the 102nd Congress.)
| CONGRESS | START YEAR | speaker | PARTY | SHARE OF PARTY VOTE | PARTY MEMBERS NOT VOTING FOR THE LEADER | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 102 | 1991 | Tom Foley | D | 99.6% | 1 | |
| 103 | 1993 | Tom Foley | D | 99.6 | 1 | |
| 104 | 1995 | Newt Gingrich | R | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 105 | 1997 | Newt Gingrich | R | 96.0 | 9 | |
| 106 | 1999 | Dennis Hastert | R | 99.5 | 1 | |
| 107 | 2001 | Dennis Hastert | R | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 108 | 2003 | Dennis Hastert | R | 99.6 | 1 | |
| 109 | 2005 | Dennis Hastert | R | 97.8 | 5 | |
| 110 | 2007 | Nancy Pelosi | D | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 111 | 2009 | Nancy Pelosi | D | 99.6 | 1 | |
| 112 | 2011 | John Boehner | R | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 113 | 2013 | John Boehner | R | 94.8 | 12 | |
| 114 | 2015 | John Boehner | R | 87.4 | 25 | |
| 114 | 2015 | Paul Ryan | R | 96.0 | 9 |
| CONGRESS | START YEAR | MINORITY LEADER | PARTY | SHARE OF PARTY VOTE | PARTY MEMBERS NOT VOTING FOR THE LEADER | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 102 | 1991 | Robert H. Michel | R | 100.0% | 0 | |
| 103 | 1993 | Robert H. Michel | R | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 104 | 1995 | Richard Gephardt | D | 99.0 | 2 | |
| 105 | 1997 | Richard Gephardt | D | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 106 | 1999 | Richard Gephardt | D | 97.1 | 6 | |
| 107 | 2001 | Richard Gephardt | D | 97.6 | 5 | |
| 108 | 2003 | Nancy Pelosi | D | 97.5 | 5 | |
| 109 | 2005 | Nancy Pelosi | D | 98.5 | 3 | |
| 110 | 2007 | John Boehner | R | 100.0 | 0 | |
| 111 | 2009 | John Boehner | R | 98.3 | 3 | |
| 112 | 2011 | Nancy Pelosi | D | 89.6 | 20 | |
| 113 | 2013 | Nancy Pelosi | D | 96.0 | 8 | |
| 114 | 2015 | Nancy Pelosi | D | 87.0 | 4 |
Ryan’s entrance into the race marked a significant spot of pique among congressional Democrats eager to shake up the party’s messaging to appeal to white working-class voters in the industrial Midwest, many of whom voted for Donald Trump. Ryan’s district, which Trump carried — a fact Pelosi gleefully pointed out in the run-up to the election — is home to many of those voters. Ryan had played up his blue-collar bona fides in the run-up to the leadership election, saying in a recent interview that the 2018 election is “not going to be won at fundraisers on the coasts — it’s going to be won in union halls in the industrial Midwest and fish fries in the Midwest and the South.”
Pelosi represents a wealthy San Francisco district, and she is known as a powerful fundraising force within the party. By contrast, Ryan’s district is struggling. Just a day after the presidential election, General Motors announced that it would be laying off 2,000 employees at a plant in his district, as well as in Lansing, Michigan.
Though Pelosi prevailed, the weakness of her victory might well mark the emergence of a coalition of more populist Democrats, carved from the same demographic cloth of the “Reagan Democrats” of the past. Ryan is steeped in this tradition, having served as an aide to and succeeded populist Rep. Jim Traficant, notorious for his corruption scandals and something of a proto-Trump personality in political life, down to the imaginative coiffure.
Pelosi spoke to reporters shortly after the vote. “We know how to win elections,” she said. “We’ve done it in the past, we will do it again.
CORRECTION (Dec. 2, 4:55 p.m.): An earlier version of this article mistakenly added votes taken during party leadership elections in the House to votes taken during the election for House speaker. Those votes are separate and should not have been shown together in the same table. The article has been updated with a new table showing the results of Democratic party leadership elections in the House since 2003. Because of that change, the headline of the article has also been changed to reflect the time period of Democratic party leadership elections since Pelosi first became minority leader.