Former US House speaker Nancy Pelosi says she won’t seek reelection next year

First elected to Congress in 1987, groundbreaking Democratic lawmaker, now 85, represented San Francisco, passed Obama’s legislative agenda, and led both of Trump’s impeachments

WASHINGTON  — Former US House Speaker Nancy Pelosi will not seek reelection, bringing to a close her storied career as not only the first woman in the speaker’s office but arguably the most powerful in American politics.

Pelosi, who has represented San Francisco for nearly 40 years, announced her decision Thursday.

“I will not be seeking reelection to Congress,” Pelosi said in a video address to voters.

Pelosi, appearing upbeat and forward-looking as images of her decades of accomplishments filled the frames, said she would finish out her final year in office. And she left those who sent her to Congress with a call to action to carry on the legacy of agenda-setting both in the US and around 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.”

Pelosi said, “And now we must continue to do so by remaining full participants in our democracy and fighting for the American ideals we hold dear.”

The decision, while not fully unexpected, ricocheted across Washington, and California, as a seasoned generation of political leaders is stepping aside ahead of next year’s midterm elections.

Pelosi remains a political powerhouse and played a pivotal role with California’s redistricting effort, Prop 50, and the party’s comeback in this month’s election. She maintains a robust schedule of public events and party fundraising, and her announced departure touches off a succession battle back home.

An architect of the Affordable Care Act and a leader on the international stage, Pelosi, who is 85, came to politics later in life, a mother of five mostly grown children. She has long fended off calls for her to step aside by turning questions about her intentions into spirited rebuttals, asking if the same was being posed of her male colleagues on Capitol Hill.

In her video address, she noted that her first campaign slogan was “a voice that will be heard.”

And with that backing, she became a speaker “whose voice would certainly be heard,” she said.

But after Pelosi quietly helped orchestrate Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the 2024 presidential race, she has decided to pass the torch, too.

Pelosi’s decision also comes as her husband of more than six decades, Paul Pelosi, was gravely injured three years ago when an intruder demanding to know “Where is Nancy?” broke into the couple’s home and beat him over the head with a hammer. His recovery from the attack, days before the 2022 midterm elections, is ongoing.

Ahead of the 2026 midterm elections, Pelosi faced a potential primary challenge in California. Left-wing newcomer Saikat Chakrabarti, who helped devise progressive superstar Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s political rise in New York, has mounted a campaign, and state Sen. Scott Wiener is also reported to be considering a run.

While Pelosi remains an unmatched force for the Democratic Party, having fundraised more than $1 billion over her career, her next steps are uncertain. First elected in 1987 after having worked in California state party politics, she has spent some four decades in public office.

Pelosi’s legacy as House speaker comes not only because she was the first woman to have the job but also because of what she did with the gavel, seizing the enormous powers that come with the suite of offices overlooking the National Mall.

During her first tenure, from 2007 to 2011, she steered the House in passing landmark legislation into law — the Affordable Care Act, the Dodd-Frank financial reforms in the aftermath of the Great Recession and a repeal of the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy against gay service members.

With President Barack Obama in the White House and Democratic Sen. Harry Reid of Nevada leading the Senate, the 2009-10 session of Congress ended among the most productive since the Johnson era.

But a conservative Republican “tea party” revolt bounced Democrats from power, ushering in a new style of Republicans, who would pave the way for Trump to seize the White House in 2016.

Determined to win back control, Pelosi helped recruit and propel dozens of women to office in the 2018 midterm elections as Democrats running as the resistance to Trump’s first term.

Pelosi became the first speaker to regain the office in some 50 years, and her second term, from 2019 to 2023, became potentially more consequential than the first, particularly as the Democratic Party’s antidote to Trump.

Trump was impeached by the House — twice — first in 2019 for withholding US aid to Ukraine as it faced a hostile Russia at its border and then in 2021 days after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. The Senate acquitted him in both cases.

Pelosi set up the January 6 special committee to probe Trump’s role in sending his mob of supporters to the Capitol, when most Republicans refused to investigate, producing the 1,000-page report that became the first full accounting of what happened as the defeated president tried to stay in office.

After Democrats lost control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections, Pelosi announced she would not seek another term as party leader.

Pelosi, a practicing Catholic who has several Jewish grandchildren, has had lifelong connections to the Jewish community and to Israel.

Her father, Thomas D’Alesandro, himself a congressman, was outspoken during the 1940s in his criticism of the Roosevelt administration for not doing enough to stop the carnage in Europe and was an early advocate of Jewish statehood.

Pelosi has also visited Israel multiple times and has hosted Israeli leaders in Washington. In recent years, she has taken to quoting Ehud Manor’s poem, “I Have No Other Country.”

In January 2024, Pelosi suggested that anti-Israel protests sweeping the US may have been linked to Russia, and that the FBI should conduct a probe into their funding.

In April of that year, she joined a call to halt arms transfers to Israel following an IDF strike in Gaza that killed seven staffers of the World Central Kitchen, including a dual US citizen, until a full investigation into the strike was completed.

A few months later, she came out against Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s invitation to Washington, calling the premier an obstacle to improving the humanitarian situation in the Strip.