Decision marks the close of a storied 20-term congressional career for the first woman to serve as House speaker
Nancy Pelosi, a California Democratic representative and the first woman to serve as speaker, announced on Thursday she will retire from Congress, two years after stepping down from House leadership.
Pelosi, who has represented San Francisco in Congress for nearly 40 years, said in a video address to her constituents that she would “not be seeking re-election”. Smiling as the music swelled over footage of a storied 20-term congressional career that saw Pelosi rise to the apex of American politics, she said she would finish out her final year in office.
“I was able to represent our city and our country around the world with patriotism and pride,” she said. “I say to my colleagues in the House all the time, no matter what title they have bestowed upon me, there has been no greater honor for me than to stand on the House floor and say, ‘I speak for the people of San Francisco.’”
A force on Capitol Hill for decades, Pelosi will leave Washington as one of the most consequential figures in modern congressional history and as a trailblazer who expanded the boundaries of power for women in US politics. As speaker, she shepherded the major legislative accomplishments of Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s presidencies.
Even when no longer in leadership, the 85-year-old remained enormously influential among Democrats, quietly counseling her party as they navigate Trump’s second term. In 2024, she played a key role pushing Biden to withdraw from the presidential race after a disastrous debate performance against Trump.
Pelosi’s decision reverberated across Washington and her adopted home state of California, as a seasoned class of Democratic lawmakers faces calls to step aside and yield to a younger generation of leaders. In 2022, she relinquished her role as House Democratic leader, declaring that the “hour has come for a new generation to lead the Democratic caucus that I so deeply respect”. But she chose to remain in the House, where Democrats bestowed on her the title of “speaker emerita”.
Biden’s decline in office, and his eventual withdrawal from the campaign, exacerbated concerns about age and term limits. Several veteran House Democrats are facing challenges from younger candidates calling for generational change, and some of Pelosi’s long-serving allies have already announced their retirements.
Pelosi’s announcement came days after Californians approved Proposition 50, a redistricting measure intended to counter Trump’s efforts to shore up House seats in Texas and other red states in next year’s midterm elections. Pelosi was a prominent Democratic proponent of the plan and refused to engage in speculation about her future until after Tuesday’s vote.
Pelosi’s departure from the race, long anticipated, will jolt the primary fight for a rare open Democratic seat in the heart of San Francisco she has occupied in Congress since 1987. Two Democrats have already jumped into the race and more are likely to join.
Saikat Chakrabarti, a former tech executive and the first chief of staff to Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, is hoping to stoke a populist revolt in Silicon Valley with an anti-establishment, anti-corruption critique that he applies to the party’s establishment and the Trump administration. Last month, state senator Scott Wiener announced he will also run for the seat, despite having previously said he would wait for Pelosi’s retirement.
In her video, Pelosi left those in the “city I live” with a call to carry on the legacy-defining work that has made the city a “beacon of hope” for the country and the world.
“My message to the city I love is this: San Francisco, know your power,” she said. “We have made history. We have made progress. We have always led the way.”
Born into a storied Baltimore political family – her father a congressman and later mayor – Pelosi absorbed the rhythms of precinct politics at her father’s side before moving to California with her husband, Paul, where she began to carve her own path. After years as a stay-at-home mother, she ran to represent San Francisco in a special election at the age of 47 – and won.
In her video address, she recalled that her first campaign slogan was “a voice that will be heard”. Because San Franciscans placed their faith in her, Pelosi said “this voice would certainly be heard.”
Within years she had become a dominant force behind the Democratic caucus, a legislative tactician, master vote-counter and prolific fundraiser who often said raising five children helped prepare her to wrangle a fractious caucus and eventually “shatter the marble ceiling,” inspiring a generation of women to seek political office.
To her detractors, Pelosi came to embody the “San Francisco liberal” – a symbol of the coastal elite and of Democratic excess. To her allies, she was simply the most effective legislative general of her generation.
She helped marshal Democratic opposition to George Bush’s plan to privatize social security and was one of the highest-profile critics of the US invasion of Iraq, a stance that eventually helped her party retake the House in 2006 and lift her to the speakership in 2007.
As speaker, Pelosi guided House Democrats through moments of extraordinary consequence: the 2008 financial crisis, the passage of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act in 2010 – her greatest legislative achievement – and, in her final years of leadership, sweeping climate and infrastructure measures under President Biden.
Her tenacity – and self-assuredness – was legendary. “I have no doubt that if I decided to run, I would win,” Pelosi told CNN in an interview that aired earlier this week. “That isn’t even a question.”
Even after losing the gavel after the 2010 midterm wipeout, when some in her caucus urged her to step aside, she ran for leader again and won. Eight years later, she reclaimed the speakership, navigating a divided caucus that included a historic class of Democratic women and new progressive voices unafraid to clash with the party’s leadership.
Over two decades, Pelosi became one of the most vilified figures in Republican politics, targeted in attack ads that turned her into a symbol of everything the right reviled about Democratic governance. Shortly before the 2022 midterm elections, the vitriol spilled into violence, when a hammer-wielding assailant broke into Pelosi’s San Francisco home and attacked her husband, later saying he planned to kidnap Pelosi and interrogate her.
Pelosi had a deeply adversarial relationship with Trump, and their clashes produced some of the most indelible images of her speakership – and of modern Washington’s partisan divide.
After initially resisting calls to impeach Trump, she relented and ultimately presided over his first impeachment in 2019. She publicly sparred with Trump in televised Oval Office meetings, memorably tore up a copy of his State of the Union address when he finished. Republicans accused her of disrespect, but she defended her actions, calling the document a “manifesto of mistruths”.
Pelosi was evacuated from the House floor when rioters breached the US Capitol on 6 January, after a weeks-long campaign by Trump to overturn Biden’s victory. From a secure location in Fort McNair, Pelosi insisted members of Congress return to the Capitol to resume proceedings as soon as possible to ensure the attack did not succeed.
She then marshaled the House through a second impeachment and later convened a Democratic-led select committee to investigate the assault. Still, Republicans have continued to allege that Pelosi, as speaker, was responsible for the security failures at the Capitol that day even though the speaker of the House is not in charge of Capitol security.
In an op-ed published in the Atlantic after her announcement, Pelosi speaks to the country, urging Americans to rekindle the nation’s founding spirit of courage, compassion, and civic duty. Though Trump’s name does not appear, Pelosi’s words are a clear rebuke of his politics and his presidency and a call to action in a moment of “darkness” and “despair”.
“Those of us who believe in liberty and dignity, goodness and generosity must never give in to the forces arrayed against the things we hold dearest,” she writes. “The battle can be exhausting, but it is a battle to which we are called by conscience and by love of country.”