Rep. Nancy Pelosi says she is warning her fellow Democrats that if President Trump is not defeated by a sizable margin in the 2020 presidential elections that he won’t respect the outcome and may refuse to leave office.
Mediaite reported that the newly crowned Speaker of the House has also been warning her colleagues to remain moderate on the campaign trail so that they don’t “play into Trump’s hands” and accidentally verify the Presidents claims that Democrats intend to move the country toward socialism.
“If we win by four seats, by a thousand votes each, he’s not going to respect the election,” Nancy Pelosi told The New York Times in a interview published on Sunday, adding that she had the same concerns before the 2018 election, when the Dems retook the House of Representatives.
“He would poison the public mind. He would challenge each of the races; he would say you can’t seat these people,” Pelosi told the NYT. “We had to win. Imagine if we hadn’t won — oh, don’t even imagine. So, as we go forward, we have to have the same approach.”
Pelosi also added that she and the Dems believe they have to “inoculate” against the possibility that “Mr. Trump would not give up power voluntarily if he lost re-election.”
Part of Pelosi’s strategy of “inoculation” involves convincing her fellow Democrats that impeachment is not the best way for challenging President Trump in Congress. Instead, she believes the Dems should focus more on making the 2020 elections a referendum on Trump’s performance and his culpability in obstructing Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into whether the President’s campaign colluded with Russia to alter the outcome of the 2016 election.
“Do not get dragged into a protracted impeachment bid that will ultimately get crushed in the Republican-controlled Senate, and do not risk alienating the moderate voters who flocked to the party in 2018 by drifting too far to the left,” she suggests, as the NYT reported.
Nancy Pelosi’s remarks are surprising to both Democrats and Republicans. Democrats are anticipating the 2020 race to be between members of the party’s far-left progressive wing, and not between moderates representing the center-left.
Progressive activists are desperately pushing the Democratic party to nominate Sen. Bernie Sanders as a way of “making up” for the socialist candidate’s defeat in 2016. And even though the moderate former Vice President Joe Biden is in the lead, there is a visible effort to derail his potential campaign.
Republicans may be surprised to learn that the Dems, including Nancy Pelosi, are still operating under the delusion that President Trump is the most likely candidate to refuse to accept the election results, particularly given that former Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton is still re-litigating the 2016 election, and that key Democratic candidates, like former Georgia gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, are refusing to accept election results.
Hillary Clinton, for example, told a Los Angeles audience on Saturday that she believes she was robbed of the presidency back in 2016.
Of course, Hillary Clinton didn’t “run the best campaign,” not even by Democratic standards. She managed to skip several key states, like Michigan and Wisconsin, where faulty internal polling showed her far ahead. As a result, she failed to get the number of Electoral College votes needed to solidify a victory.
Last week Abrams told an audience that she wasn’t governor of Georgia “yet,” despite losing the state by more than 50,000 votes.
