***Speaker Nancy Pelosi Appreciation/Admiration/Love/Respect Thread***

[Gothmog]

30. Nancy Pelosi does not care if you hate her

I also like this article http://theweek.com/articles/761142/nancy-pelosi-doesnt-care-hate

Nancy Pelosi welcomes your hatred.

Okay, that may be an exaggeration. But when the Republican Party spends so much of its time talking about her, you'd think she'd be a bit more perturbed. And there's no sign she is.

She has good reason. We just saw yet another election in which Republicans tried everything they could do to tie the Democratic candidate to Pelosi, and he won anyway. Conor Lamb, the victor in that Pennsylvania special election, said at the campaign's outset that he wouldn't be voting for Pelosi for speaker in 2019 if he were elected, since he thought the time had come for a new generation to take control (Pelosi, who's 77, has been in Congress for over 30 years). That might not have made Pelosi feel good, but she's as hard-headed as they come, and if it helped win a seat for Democrats, she wasn't going to complain.

But we don't know whether it actually did help. Perhaps Lamb's stance defused the attack (though it certainly didn't stop Republicans from making it), or perhaps when people are voting for their member of Congress, they don't much care who the party's leader is.

That sounds like a radical thing to say, but the truth is that we have zero evidence that it actually changes any votes when every Republican candidate shouts "My opponent is just a puppet of San Francisco liberal Nancy Pelosi!" There's no question that Republican voters dislike her, but that's very different from her actually having an effect on the outcome of any race. But we've been seeing those ads for so long we just assume they must make a difference