Cara Brown McCormick
In an August 11 interview with Politico's Jonathan Martin in Sacramento, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi delivered a scoop about the private meeting she had with Joe Biden, just before he withdrew from the 2024 race.
Asked whether she regretted not speaking up earlier about President Biden's decision to run for reelection in 2024, Pelosi said no, and gave her most detailed account yet of their private conversation.
"Let me say what I did about Joe Biden, because it has been written about in a way that did not really happen," she said. "I only said to President Biden, I have come to question the polling that you have and how your campaign is being conducted. I think there has to be a better campaign to win the White House."
Asked how Biden responded, Pelosi said: "We were prayerful, Catholic. We had a lovely meeting. It was only the two of us, except when you put somebody on the phone to talk about the polls." She said Biden told her:
"I get tested every day in what I'm doing."
Pelosi said the account of the meeting that circulated afterward "did not come from me," and that she never discussed it publicly. "I had never talked to anybody about this," she said. She added that she does not know who around Biden may have recognized the need for a change sooner.
"Whoever knew, whoever knew, family knew, I don't know," she said. "They should have, because this was a great man."
Pelosi said those close to Biden during his reelection campaign should have shared what they knew about his mental acuity.
— POLITICO (@politico) August 11, 2026
“When you think of the debate and how sad that was, that’s really when we learned,” @SpeakerPelosi told @jmart at @POLITICOLive's Sacramento Summit👇 pic.twitter.com/WMNFO6S8r4
Pelosi clearly also wanted to discuss California.
She said that "power is in numbers” and confidently predicted that California will gain five new Democratic members of Congress in 2026, pushing the state's House delegation to 48 members, figures she called "very substantial" when viewed as a percentage of the whole.
Pelosi said that if the Democrats take back the House, California Reps. Jared Huffman and Zoe Lofgren would become chairs of committees, and that many other California Democrats would hold subcommittee gavels, with Rep. Pete Aguilar and Rep. Ted Lieu already part of the party's leadership team.
It's "not just about numbers, it's about quality," Pelosi said, calling Lofgren "remarkable" and noting she will chair the Science, Space, and Technology Committee.
Pelosi recalled growing frustrated after Democrats lost the House majority in 1994. By 2000, with California's delegation split 26-26 and national Democrats needing seven seats to retake the majority, she told colleagues she would personally deliver four or five of those seats, on one condition:
"I have to run the show in California."
California Democrats flipped their delegation from 31-21 that year, she said, netting a five-seat class that included Adam Schiff, Jane Harman, Mike Honda, Hilda Solis and Susan Davis. "We won five seats!" she said.
Pelosi said her goal for November is thirty seats flipped nationally, and she weighed in on a competitive California race for her former seat: "I respect everyone. But I am for Connie Chan to win that seat."
As for why any of it matters, she put it simply: "This is about having elections for the future."
"We want to honor the values of our founders and honor the sacrifice of our men and women in uniform to protect our freedom," she said, "and we want to address and be worthy of the aspirations of our children, to make the future better for them."
Pelosi said when she first arrived in Congress, only 23 of 435 members were women. She said today 96 women in Congress are Democrats, and "we want more." She said heading the Democratic Women's Caucus was among the biggest joys of her career.
"Collaboration is what I think women do very well."
Today, she proudly noted, 70 percent of the Democratic caucus is made up of women, people of color or LGBTQ members, while acknowledging the group still has its "diversity of opinion" and "some disagreement."
She spoke proudly of her own rise to power in the country. The speakership, she said, is "the third highest most powerful job in the country," after president and vice president, and being the first woman to hold it was "a special honor" made possible by the courage of colleagues and allies around her.
She discussed the different layers of political work necessary to make change: "Without the outside groups we cannot succeed on the inside," she said. "Our volunteers in politics, our VIPs, our insider network can accomplish so much."
Her job right now, she said, "is to make sure we win and that we win big in November, and that is about every member represents his or her own district." As she put it: "The job description and the job title are one and the same: representative."
"Let me talk about me for a second," Pelosi said. She never set out for any of this. "If I had other aspirations when I came to Congress, then I wouldn't gain the confidence of the people," she said. "I'm a legislator. I was successful in becoming the first woman because people trusted me when I said, ‘let's build a consensus for a difficult challenge.’”
Her advice to anyone weighing a run is to ask "what's your path." "I never intended to run for Congress," she said. "I never intended to run for Speaker."
She recalled the moment she decided to run. By then, she had had "five children in six years and seven days," she said. She was recruited to run for Congress by Sala Burton, and left the final decision to her then 16-year-old daughter, Alexandra.
She'd be gone three nights a week when Congress was in session, she told her. "Whatever you say, I will do." Alexandra's answer changed the course of history: "Mother, get a life."
As Pelosi put it: "What teenage girl would not want her teenage mother outside of the house three days a week?" Her husband was "lovely about it," Pelosi said, and so she ran.
She pushed back on the idea that her early dynamic with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had been rocky.
"When she came, we didn’t have a rocky relationship. All we are saying to folks is, look, this is a legislative place. It is not a rally," Pelosi explained. "If you have a rallying cry, take it to the rally, but don't expect it to become the legislative agenda for people who represent completely different districts."
She called working with Ocasio-Cortez "a joy" and praised her as "operational," which as Martin remarked, was high praise coming from her.
Asked about Gov. Gavin Newsom's presidential ambitions, she stopped short of an endorsement and said he was "very hard working.”
When asked whether she'd remain partisan in her upcoming role at UC Berkeley, Pelosi called it "almost emancipation from partisan politics." "Not from politics, but partisanship," she clarified, "because I think I can play a role in trying to bring people together."
She recalled a Congress where "we have Democrats and Republicans and differences of opinion and respect for each other," adding, "we viewed each other as patriots and differences of opinion, that was a great thing."
She pointed to UC Berkeley's most popular new class this fall, on "how to understand another person's perspective."
"Is that not beautiful? Isn't that what we should be trying to do?" she asked.
"Leaving the politics to the issues, not policies of personal destruction as they have been doing to me, but just on the issues: where do you stand on the policy? Where can you find common ground?"
That, she said, is what the Founders had in mind in giving the House two-year terms. Pelosi explained that around the time of the Declaration of Independence, the framers began writing "the blueprint for democracy," the Constitution, and the House of Representatives mattered enormously to them: unlike the Senate, it gave the public full, proportional representation from the start.
Madison and Jefferson believed the House has a "spiritual relationship" with the people, she said, and that is the reason for its two-year terms, to keep members perpetually running for re-election. The House functions as a constant check on the president, and she said pointedly that the 2026 midterms will be "a referendum on our president."
Pelosi didn't hold back on the current state of the opposition, saying Republicans "are destroying our democracy, shattering hopes and dreams and aspirations of our founders."