Nancy Pelosi's 2012 Campaign

Born in Maryland on March 26 1940, Nancy Pelosi took up the family tradition of politics involvement as she grew up. She started as a volunteer, moved up the ranks, into public office for California in 1987 following a significant election. She became the first House female speaker and the first Democratic Leader female of the House of Representatives (McElroy, 2008). She remained the speaker until 2010 in November, when the republicans gained control of the house, and became the Minority Leader in the house.

As the speaker of the house, she always took a leading role in influencing the congressional agendas. Her ability to pass bills faced challenges when some modest democrats defected on agendas like wiretapping program by the Bush administration and the war on Iraq. When Obama ascended to power, it meant that she would not be as dominant as she was in shaping her political agenda, though she remained a republican. However, she got the leader of the minority in the house after the democrats lost majority rule, which was a less powerful position than the one she held initially.

John Dennis is an entrepreneur, who was running against Pelosi on a republican ticket highlighting the latter’s failed policies, among them the ineffective economic stimulus programs, high unemployment in San Francisco and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (Dennis, 2012). John opposes the aimless wars on the East, which resulted in the death of many people, though Nancy Pelosi was also advocating for the withdrawal of the military from Afghanistan and Iraq. He advocated for the protection of privacy and personal liberties. During the campaigns, John Dennis focused his campaigns on fighting Pelosi and gathering support from republicans, democrats and other citizens to help him in defeating Pelosi.

Though John Dennis campaigned hard to beat Pelosi in the elections, she still won with a remarkably wide margin of 74% against his 13%. This was because; Nancy Pelosi is an outspoken proponent of HIV/AIDS research funding and abortion rights despite the fact she is a catholic. She also focused on job creation, workers’ rights and unemployment insurance. She also advocated for civil rights liberties, advocated for contraception (for families) to check the numbers of children they get due to the economic difficulties, and signed for No Child Left behind Act, which established tracking of students and increased of overall education spending (McElroy, 2008).  In addition, she advocated for invention of new technologies that would reduce USA’s reliance on foreign oil. She also played a key role in the formulation and pushing for Obama Care reforms. This won her support of the Californians resulting in the massive win over the republican John Dennis.

The campaign issues in California like many other states  included the ever rising deficits, cutting the budget, the increasing unemployment rates, military spending, temporary taxes to finance education, state and local government budgets, death penalty human trafficking, abortion, gays rights and issues, genetically modified foods labeling and energy funding (Cannon and Bevan, 2011).

During the primary elections, the Democratic Party garnered 2,650,477 votes, which represents a 53.46% while the Republican Party garnered 2,074,864 votes representing a 41.85% of the total votes. No party preference had 188,627 votes representing 3.80%. Green Party had 26,674 votes representing 0.54%, and Libertarian Party had 14,787 votes representing 0.30% while Peace and Freedom had 2,415 votes representing 0.05%. During the general elections of November 6 2012, the democrats won 38 while the republicans won 15 seats of the 53 districts. Nancy Pelosi had 89,446 during the primary elections and 181,182 votes in the general elections. John Dennis, on the other hand, garnered 16,206 votes in the primary elections and 32,809 votes during the general elections.