Nancy Pelosi retiring after 38 years representing San Francisco in Congress

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who has represented San Francisco in Congress for 38 years, announced Thursday morning that she will not seek reelection. Pelosi delivered the news in a video message framed as a “Dear San Francisco” letter, reflecting on the city’s progress and challenges.

“San Francisco — know your power,” she said. “We have made history. We have always led the way. And now we must continue to do so. By remaining full participants in our democracy and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear.”

First elected in 1987 to fill a seat left vacant by the death of Rep. Sala Burton, Pelosi, 85, leaves a voluminous legacy of accomplishment highlighted by the 2010 passage of the Affordable Care Act, which continues to provide health care to tens of millions of Americans who otherwise could not afford it.

In Washington, Pelosi successfully fought for vastly more federal funding for HIV/AIDS and oversaw the bipartisan transformation of the shuttered Presidio Army base into a vibrant public park with housing, restaurants and nonprofit organizations — a financially self-sufficient operation managed by the Presidio Trust in partnership with the National Park Service.

“No one — period, full stop — delivered more for San Francisco and the state of California than Nancy Pelosi, by factors of almost infinity in terms of actually delivering real results for real people,” said Gov. Gavin Newsom recently on KQED’s Political Breakdown.

In her first campaign, Pelosi was known mostly to political insiders, heavyweights like Phil Burton, who, along with his brother, John, masterminded a campaign operation that helped push Pelosi to victory. Fourteen candidates entered the race, including four San Francisco supervisors.

Some disparaged Pelosi as a political dilettante, a white, wealthy woman who could not possibly relate to the average person.

“She’s never met a payroll. She’s never had to worry about child care,” Supervisor Carol Ruth Silver said during a heated debate televised by KQED in 1987. “She’s never worried about the things that worry most of the people in San Francisco.”

Pelosi held her ground and dismissed the criticism as a bump along the way.

“My attitude is, they’ll take the low road, and I’ll take the high road, and I will get the Congress before them,” Pelosi said at the time.

And she did. Years later, her reputation as a street fighter in designer clothing and heels was well established.

“You have to know how to take a punch and throw a punch,” she said on KQED’s Political Breakdown in 2018.

Then-President Bill Clinton signs the Ryan White Comprehensive AIDS Resources Emergency Act Amendments in 1996 at the White House. Standing behind Clinton are (L-R) Jeanne White, mother of Ryan, White House Aide Patsy Fleming, Sen. Bill Frist (R-TN), Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA).

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Pelosi’s career in Washington began in the depths of despair for San Francisco — the early years of the AIDS epidemic, when HIV infection was essentially a death sentence. She made increased AIDS funding and improving the social safety net a top priority. And she delivered.

Ernest Hopkins of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation said Pelosi’s fingerprints are on all of the major federal initiatives helping to fight the epidemic, including “being one of the principle supporters of the Ryan White Care Act, initiation of Housing Opportunities for People with AIDS, the Americans with Disabilities Act — I mean critical components of what we would call the health safety net that have been used over the years to support probably millions of people living with HIV,” Hopkins said, adding that her advocacy went far beyond her own district.

“She understood that we could not end the HIV epidemic without addressing the epidemic in Black and Latino communities. And so she was all in,” Hopkins said.

Pelosi’s rise to power within the Democratic Party did not come easily.

“Other people came to me and said, ‘You must run for leadership.’ And when I did run for a high office and leadership, some of the men said, ‘Who said she could run?’ Well, that just lit my fire, really. Who said she can run? We don’t need permission,” she recalled in 2018.

U.S. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-California, delivers remarks from the House Chambers of the U.S. Capitol Building on November 17, 2022, in Washington, D.C.

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Pelosi disrupted the traditional pecking order of power in Washington.

After the 2006 midterm elections, when Pelosi led her caucus to a resounding victory — reclaiming a majority in the House for the first time in 12 years — her selection as the next speaker was sealed.

“She didn’t do that by being shy or deferential,” said journalist Susan Page, author of Madam Speaker: Nancy Pelosi and the Lessons of Power. “She did that by being tough and direct and fearless. And those are characteristics she brought to the job.”

Despite her image as a partisan warrior, Pelosi often set aside party affiliation to do what she thought was right.

She derailed efforts in her caucus to impeach President George W. Bush over the Iraq War. And in 2008, when the economy was cratering due to the subprime mortgage crisis, she rounded up enough Democratic votes to pass the Troubled Asset Relief Program, which Democratic critics described as a Wall Street bailout, to help shore up financial institutions crippled by “toxic assets.”

That willingness to set aside party differences was noted by former Republican Speaker John Boehner at the unveiling of Pelosi’s official portrait in 2022.

“You’ve been a fierce warrior for your party, but when the stakes were highest, you were willing to put the interests of the nation first and take the heat for it. Now that’s leadership,” Boehner said, adding, “No other speaker of the House in the modern era, Republican or Democrat, has wielded the gavel with such authority or with such consistent results.”

In some ways, the things Pelosi did worst — like media interviews — were the things most people saw, while her strengths were seen by few: cultivating relationships and understanding how to win enough votes to pass legislation. It’s what made her, in her own words, a “master legislator.”

“You have to understand people’s motivation, their district, their priorities,” Pelosi said.

After Democrats retook the House in 2018, Pelosi was again elected speaker. She guided investigations into President Donald Trump, including two successful impeachments in the House that ultimately failed in the Senate.

During Joe Biden’s administration, Pelosi again wielded enormous power, helping the House pass landmark legislation, including COVID-19 funding, climate change initiatives and the CHIPS Act, which provided incentives for domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors — essential computer components made mostly overseas.

Speaker of the House Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) introduces President Joe Biden during the 2022 House Democratic Caucus Issues Conference in Philadelphia.

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Pelosi and Biden were close political allies for decades. But in 2024, after the president’s disastrous debate performance against Trump, it was Pelosi who opened the door to Biden dropping out during an interview on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” saying “time is running short” for the president to decide whether he would run again — even though he had already said he would. Pelosi’s subtle yet unmistakable nudge for Biden to step aside succeeded.

“She tried to get others to go raise this issue with President Biden, saying that he shouldn’t run again, and no one would make it as directly as she would,” Page said. “So she finally did it herself, not just in private, but in public.”

To this day, Biden is reportedly angry with Pelosi over her role in pushing him aside. “In retrospect, turns out she was right. He shouldn’t have run again,” Page said.

In 2022, the speaker’s family paid the price of rising political violence when David DePape broke into the Pelosi home in San Francisco and attacked her husband, Paul, with a hammer, fracturing his skull. DePape said he was looking for Nancy Pelosi, who was out of town at the time, and wanted to “break her kneecaps.” DePape was sentenced to 30 years in federal prison and life in state prison without the possibility of parole.

Ultimately, Pelosi made history as the first woman and the first Californian to become Speaker of the House. But it’s what she did with that power — for her district, her state and her nation — that mattered most.

“You can never take that for granted,” Newsom said in assessing Pelosi’s impact. “It will take 40, 50 years for someone to build the kind of credibility that she’s built and the influence and the capacity to deliver that as Nancy Pelosi.”