Nobody can work the phones quite like Nancy.
That seemed to be the consensus earlier this month when, surrounded by phone bankers for Supervisor Connie Chan’s congressional campaign, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi went from Chan’s most famous supporter to her most effective closer.
Running her pen down the list of undecided San Francisco voters and their phone numbers, the forever speaker’s spiel during an Oct. 9 phone banking session immediately distinguished her from the 20 other people making calls for Chan in her race against fellow Democrat, California Sen. Scott Wiener to succeed Pelosi in Congress.
“This is Nancy Pelosi,” she said.
“I know the Congress better than anyone, I know the district better than anyone, and I know that Connie is the best person for the job,” she said.
Any questions?
In her first two phone calls, Pelosi secured back-to-back votes for Chan, ringing a bell each time to signal another voter won over. “Two for two!” one volunteer shouted after the second ding.
Over the course of an hour, Pelosi left a handful of voicemails, and talked with about a dozen voters. She did not receive a single “no.”
Pelosi was far and away the most successful phone banker that evening. Chan’s middle-school aged son Edo was the runner-up.
Pelosi officially endorsed Chan in May and, in recent months, has gone to great lengths to get her elected. She sent a trusted aide to direct communications for Chan’s campaign and has helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for her. Some of Chan’s most high-profile endorsers have been longtime allies of Pelosi, including U.S. Sen. Adam Schiff and former U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.
Still, Pelosi’s support is no sure winner: One poll showed that strong backers of the former U.S. House speaker were still more likely to vote for Wiener over Chan. And Wiener, for his part, has worked to convince voters that Chan cannot govern, or campaign, without Pelosi.
“If Connie Chan can’t run a basic campaign operation … how is she going to stand up to Donald Trump and MAGA and fight for San Francisco in Congress?” said Joe Arellano, Wiener’s campaign spokesperson in a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle in August.
Chan, for her part, has rejected that suggestion. But, as if to underscore Wiener’s point, on the day Pelosi joined the phone bank, Chan struggled to make headway with a voter on the fence. So she offered the phone to Pelosi, who grabbed it without hesitation and walked to a corner of the room. Chan followed, smiling as she waited for Pelosi to make her pitch. By this point, Pelosi had the volunteers’ full attention.
Eventually, Pelosi hung up. She walked to the bell and rang it.
While Chan’s race against Wiener is a significant one for San Francisco, it is safe to say that Pelosi and the national Democratic Party have bigger fish to fry — she has spent the last month traveling across the country to boost Democrats vying for other congressional seats.
Nevertheless, the speaker emerita continues to stump when she can for her chosen successor. As Election Day approached, she made an unexpected appearance at a rally in North Beach Saturday, and released another endorsement video Monday.
Pelosi even made an appearance last week at an event in the Richmond District, the neighborhood Chan represents in City Hall, while Chan took part in a town hall with progressive politicians in Berkeley.
The event was at the Internet Archive, in celebration of the digital nonprofit library, which Chan has championed at City Hall. The Archive’s founder, Brewster Kahle, has donated $100,000 to a pro-Chan political action committee.
Much of Pelosi’s seven-minute speech at the archive’s pantheonic headquarters that night had to do with libraries — and their import to her family and political career — but she began and concluded with Chan.
“Connie Chan’s the person who told me” about the event, she told the crowd of 150 early in her speech, as computer servers whirred behind the pews. The supervisor’s efforts to honor the archive with a resolution, Pelosi said, helped the nonprofit receive official federal designation as a library.
As Pelosi headed off stage to a standing ovation, she stopped and turned around to tell the crowd one last thing: “tell a friend across the country” to vote for a congressperson who will support libraries.
“And that’s why I’m so happy,” she said, “that this was so important to Connie.”