Speaker Nancy Pelosi on Friday expressed confidence Democrats would keep control of the House in the 2022 election.
'I'm very confident that we will win the House,' she said during her weekly Capitol news conference.
Her comments came after a report that Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney, the head of the House Democrats' campaign arm, warned if the midterm elections were held now, the Democrats would lose the majority.
He partnered his bleak forecast with new polling that showed Democrats falling behind Republicans by a half-dozen points on a generic ballot in battleground districts, Politico reported.
Pelosi dismissed the warning.
'There are several scenarios here,' she said. 'That was one of them.'
She said Democrats would use the odds to run even harder.
'I always run from behind,' she said.
'We always want to be cautious,' Pelosi said. Maloney's message to lawmakers last week, she noted, was 'always run scared.'
Speaker Nancy Pelosi expressed confidence Democrats would keep control of the House in the 2022 election
House Republican Leader Kevin McCarthy (center) has taken to calling Pelosi a 'lame duck's speaker
Pelosi holds a slim majority in the House: 220 Democrats to 212 Republicans and three vacant seats.
Historically, the president's party tends to do badly in the first midterms after they talk office. Both Barack Obama and Donald Trump saw their respective parties lose control of the House of Representatives in their first midterms - 2010 and 2018.
House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, who would be the presumptive speaker if Republicans win the House next year, has expressed confidence of his own he'll take the top job.
McCarthy has called Pelosi a 'lame duck speaker' - an insult to her power and his way of declaring he will occupy the office next. Pelosi would be a lame duck only if Republicans win control of the House in the November 2022 election.
He has doubled down on that, causing outraged Democrats to demand McCarthy apologize or resign for a comment he made over the weekend where he threated to hit Pelosi with the speaker's gavel should he replace her in the House's top job.
'Dear @GOPLeader McCarthy: Don't you think America has had enough political violence? You should never be encouraging or threatening or joking about causing violence to anyone, including the Speaker of the House. You need to apologize for your statement, or resign,' wrote Democratic Rep. Ted Lieu of California.
