Democrats will retake the US House’s majority in the 2026 midterm elections, the chamber’s former speaker Nancy Pelosi has confidently predicted – and she hopes her party colleagues then seize back the congressional power that Republicans have all but ceded to Donald Trump.
Asked Sunday on ABC News’s This Week if she had any doubts over whether Democratic New York congressman Hakeem Jeffries would hold the speaker’s gavel after the elections midway through Trump’s second presidency, Pelosi said: “None.”
“Hakeem Jeffries is ready,” the 20-term California congresswoman remarked in an interview with This Week co-anchor Jonathan Karl. “He’s eloquent, he’s respected by the members, he is a unifier.”
Furthermore, Pelosi told Karl that “when” Democrats win the House back, they need to reclaim powers of Congress that she maintained have mostly been handed over to Trump by the Republican-led legislative branch.
“Right now, Republicans in the Congress have abolished the Congress,” said Pelosi, who was US House speaker from 2007 to 2011 and 2019 to 2023. Generally, Pelosi added: “They just do what the president insists that they do. That will be over.
“That ends as soon as we have the gavel.”
Pelosi is far from alone in her prediction. With Trump’s approval rating down to 36% and disapproval rising to 60% in a November Gallup poll, Republicans have been girding themselves for a trouncing in the 2026 midterms, as the Guardian reported Saturday.
Beside the president’s evident unpopularity, there’s substantial history showing the party that holds the White House usually endures losses in midterm elections.
Several Republicans senators amid all that have announced they are not running for re-election in the midterms, including Kentucky’s Mitch McConnell, North Carolina’s Thom Tillis, Iowa’s Joni Ernst and Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville. And more than two dozen House Republicans have indicated that they do not intend to try to retain their seat, causing some to wonder whether all of those officeholders are deserting what they fear to be a sinking ship.
Pelosi herself declared in November that she would retire at the end of her final term in early 2027. The 85-year-old has cited her age as a major factor in her decision, coming at the end of a career that saw her become the first woman to serve as US House speaker after joining Congress in 1988 to represent San Francisco.
Nonetheless, she told ABC that she considered returning the House speaker’s gavel to a Democrat to be one of her last pieces of unfinished business.
“By and large, the American people are good people – and I would like to … take us back to a place where governance and politics understand that,” Pelosi told Karl. “So what’s next for me is … that we try to take the discussion to a place that believes in the goodness of the American people – that gives them hope.”
