Nancy Pelosi threw her full political weight behind Connie Chan as her House successor, and San Francisco voters handed the seat to Scott Wiener instead.

Connie Chan conceded Wednesday evening in the race to replace Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, trailing after ballots were tallied even as the contest had not yet been officially called. The New York Post reported Chan trailing 55.5% to 44.5% when she folded.

Chan said she saw no clear path forward. “After reviewing the results and the ballots remaining to be counted, while we expect the margin to narrow significantly, we do not have a clear path to victory,” she wrote in a statement, while thanking Pelosi for four decades of service.

Pelosi had gone all in. She endorsed Chan, hosted fundraisers, appeared at campaign stops, cut social videos, loaned her top communications aide, and pressed labor groups. She did not show up at Chan’s election-night party Tuesday. The outcome ends Pelosi’s hold on the San Francisco seat she has represented since 1987 and marks the city’s first truly competitive congressional race in decades.

The San Francisco Chronicle reporting laid out how hard the former speaker worked the district she knows better than anyone in Democratic politics, and how little of that machinery moved the voters who actually cast ballots.

Pelosi’s endorsement closed a primary gap, then ran into a wall

Two weeks before the June primary, Chan sat in a statistical tie with former Stripe engineer Saikat Chakrabarti. Pelosi’s endorsement helped nudge Chan into the top two. After the primary, Chan narrowed the individual-donor gap in part because of that backing.

Pelosi repeated a simple line on the trail: “I know and love this district. I know the Congress. And I know Connie.”

She told KQED the choice rested on shared experience. “Being a mom is very important to voters because it says we have a shared experience. So I want somebody there who understands the challenges I face being a working mom.”

"Being a mom is very important to voters because it says we have a shared experience. So I want somebody there who understands the challenges I face being a working mom."

On Wednesday night she still praised Chan as “a working mom, a public servant, and an immigrant” who “gave voice to families whose struggles she knows firsthand.” For Wiener she offered a terse line: “I wish him success in service for the people of our City.”

The working-mom frame did not match earlier choices. In the 2024 California Senate primary, Pelosi backed Adam Schiff over Katie Porter and Barbara Lee, both working moms. The rationale shifted when the candidate was Chan.

Voters preferred Wiener even among Pelosi fans

A May San Francisco Chronicle poll showed Wiener leading across almost every demographic group of likely primary voters. Forty percent of respondents said they planned to vote for him or leaned that way.

An October survey from the USC Democracy and Fair Elections Lab cut deeper. Among voters who strongly approved of Pelosi, Wiener still led Chan 54% to 46%. Among those who “somewhat approve” of Pelosi, Wiener led 60% to 39%.

Money told the same story. As of the most recent filing, Wiener had raised about $4.6 million to Chan’s $2.2 million. The tech-backed Abundant Future PAC spent more than $2 million supporting Wiener and opposing Chan, with donors including billionaires Chris Larsen and John Pritzker. Chan repeatedly attacked Wiener’s PAC funding. It did not close the gap.

Christian Grose, director of the USC Democracy and Fair Elections Lab, put the endorsement’s limited reach in plain terms.

"It was close due to Pelosi's endorsement, but Wiener's victory over the more progressive Chan was more challenging for him due in part to Pelosi."

Jason McDaniel, a political science professor at San Francisco State University, drew the sharper distinction that matters for any party machine.

"She still has an enormous amount of influence in Democratic politics all around the country. But I think there's a difference between having influence and delivering votes."

That gap between national brand and local ballots is the story Democrats keep rediscovering when voters stop taking orders. Similar internal strains have shown up in House procedural fights where party lines fray.

A long cooling with Wiener and a chatbot that backfired

The relationship between Pelosi and Wiener cooled after he opened an exploratory committee in 2023. He insisted he would wait for her to retire. She bristled at the early move. The Chronicle account framed the endorsement as driven at least partly by a one-sided beef with the state senator.

Top national Democratic donor Susie Tompkins Buell, who cofounded the group Emerge that trains women candidates, said she could not get a straight answer on the opposition.

"Nobody can give a good answer of why she's doing this. It's just a mystery to so many people. I've heard all different ideas about what people think, but it's too bad. Whatever it is, it is rooted in pettiness."

In August the Wiener campaign released ConnieChan.ai, a parody chatbot powered by Anthropic’s Claude model that described itself as trained to “say no to anything you ask.” Pelosi rallied Democratic lawmakers and San Francisco political groups against it. Wiener pulled the bot and apologized, saying the spoof “missed the mark.” San Francisco Democratic Party Chair Nancy Tung dismissed much of the reaction as “fake outrage.”

Pelosi’s national profile remains large, she has raised more than $1 billion for Democrats over three decades and still weighs in on party fights, including recent comments on other Democrats’ Israel positions. Local delivery is another matter.

Four losing bets in three years

Chan’s defeat fits a short, clear pattern. Over the past three years Pelosi has backed four losing efforts at home and nearby: Dean Preston’s 2024 Board of Supervisors loss to Bilal Mahmood; the successful 2025 recall of Supervisor Joel Engardio that she opposed; an apparent late endorsement of Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis in the governor’s race days before Kounalakis quit the bid; and now Chan.

She did help former local aide Gary McCoy win a Board of Supervisors seat. She also appeared to influence Gov. Gavin Newsom’s decision not to endorse in the House race. Those wins and side moves did not reverse the larger trend inside her own city.

Barbara Perry, a professor of governance at the University of Virginia, described the political reality without romance.

"I don't think that's going to make a major difference in her long, long legacy of service in the House Representatives, but it says that she had become a lame duck. She was not going to be running again. She was no longer speaker, and the times are changing. People are tired of the gerontocracy."

Pelosi is 86. Her daughter Christine is already running for the state Senate seat Wiener will leave. The family brand continues. The voters just refused the handoff she preferred for Congress.

Democratic midterm messaging still leans on familiar economic attacks and leadership theater, the kind of national offensive Pelosi has helped drive before. San Francisco just showed the limits of that playbook when the race is local and the voters can see the candidates up close.

Power struggles inside the House caucus keep shifting as the midterms approach, with impeachment talk and opposition tactics already in circulation. None of that restored Pelosi’s ability to name her own successor.

Wiener now takes the seat after building a fundraising edge, holding poll leads for months, and surviving both a parody-bot mess and the most powerful Democrat San Francisco has produced in a generation. Chan ran as the more progressive choice and as Pelosi’s pick. Voters chose the other path.

Machine politics still raises money and books endorsements. It does not automatically deliver the district when the people who live there decide they have had enough of being told who comes next.