State Sen. Scott Wiener speaks at the kickoff rally for his congressional campaign to replace Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi in Congress at the Swedish American Hall in San Francisco on Oct. 29, 2025.
Carlos Avila Gonzalez/S.F. Chronicle
Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi co-hosts a shadow hearing on Democrats’ plans to protect democracy in San Francisco on April 9, 2026.
Jessica Christian/S.F. Chronicle
Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and state Sen. Scott Wiener are two of the best known elected officials in San Francisco. Wiener is now the front-runner in the race to succeed Pelosi in Congress. Yet the two high-profile Democrats have virtually no relationship, a fact driven home Monday by Pelosi’s endorsement of one of Wiener’s Democratic rivals.
Pelosi endorsed San San Francisco Supervisor Connie Chan to fill the seat she has held since 1987, saying Chan was “the leader best prepared to carry forward the fight for San Francisco in the Congress of the United States.”
She has said nothing about the other top candidates in the race — Saikat Chakrabarti, a wealthy former software engineer and top aide to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, nor Wiener. When asked by the Chronicle if she thought Wiener would do a good job in Congress as she predicted Chan would, Pelosi said recently, “I haven’t spoken to him about it. He hasn’t asked me about it. So she has, and I know what she is about.”
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Wiener declined Tuesday to “comment on my specific conversations with the speaker emerita. I think it’s been crystal clear that I would be honored to have her endorsement, and I respect that she has made a choice, and that is entirely her choice to make, and that she’s made a choice.”
There’s no longstanding disagreement nor any personal animus behind Pelosi’s decision to look beyond the frontrunner, according to several people who know Pelosi and Wiener. But as the race tightens and Pelosi has made her choice known, their lack of relationship takes on new meaning.
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“I don’t know of a public beef between them but I don’t know if they have a relationship to speak of,” Rudy Gonzalez, secretary-treasurer of the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, who has known both for years, told me. The San Francisco Labor Council has endorsed Chan. “And that says something to me unto itself.”
Pelosi’s endorsement of Chan is primarily based on political considerations — even though it contradicts that of the California Democratic Party, which backed Wiener.
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A more powerful factor is that both Pelosi and Chan are tight allies with organized labor, particularly the building trades unions. Chan’s campaign regularly touts its backing from unions including the California Labor Federation, National Nurses United and the California Teachers Association, among others. Wiener is backed by LiUNA, the laborers union, the Northern California Carpenters and the United Food and Commercial Workers.
But there are other factors at play, too.
Pelosi, who shattered the glass ceiling by becoming the first female speaker in 2007, has long championed women running for office. (One notable exception was when she backed her longtime Washington lieutenant, Adam Schiff, for Senate in 2024 in California over then-Reps. Barbara Lee and Katie Porter.)
Pelosi often encourages women mulling a run for office to “know their why” — their reason for running — and then enter what she typically calls the “rough arena” of politics. But she bristled at Wiener’s moves to run for her seat while she was still occupying it — despite Wiener’s insistence that he would wait for her to retire — and their relationship cooled publicly after he opened an exploratory committee in 2023.
Wiener remained publicly deferential to Pelosi, including at a “Women for Scott” fundraiser in San Francisco in June 2023, where the cheapest ticket to entry was $250 and the priciest $3,300. Wiener opened his remarks by thanking guests at the informal backyard event “for choosing to be here for a race that’s not happening.”
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Wiener praised Pelosi as “a transformational force” responsible for the Affordable Care Act and a longtime protector of LGBTQ rights and democracy at the event, and noted how “deeply lucky we are to have her, to be able to call her our member of Congress.”
So, Wiener continued, “When people say to me, ‘Oh, what if she runs again next year? ’ My response is, ‘That’s two more years that we get of Nancy Pelosi and the country gets of Nancy Pelosi. She is amazing, and I am so honored to be able to call her a friend and to support her.’”
But Wiener’s decision to wait Pelosi out proved to be a tricky dance. Pelosi, the master of projecting and holding power, would never want to compromise her effectiveness by prematurely announcing she was leaving.
But in February 2025, the ground shifted.
Chakrabarti announced he was running for the seat in a direct challenge to Pelosi. He had masterminded Ocasio-Cortez’s upset of one of Pelosi’s former House lieutenants, Rep. Joe Crowley, in 2018. He knew the blueprint for how those sort of young outsider versus the establishment races worked in a liberal district.
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Chakrabarti’s move nudged Wiener as well. With a virtually unlimited bank account — Chakrabarti has spent more than $6 million of his own money on the House race so far — he could rapidly introduce himself to an electorate. Zohran Mamdani’s New York mayoral campaign was catching the attention of Democrats nationally, and Chakrabarti and some of his supporters sought to cast him as part of the same wave.
Then there was the speculation that Pelosi was angling to help her daughter run for the seat in Congress. Former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who is close to Pelosi and supports Chan for Congress, said he didn’t know of any rift between Pelosi and Wiener, but added that “I suspect, though, that the daughter may have wanted to run in one of those times that an opportunity presented itself, and he instead became the candidate,” Brown told me.
Both Pelosis have long batted down insinuations that Nancy Pelosi was making decisions aimed at supporting her daughter’s political aspirations, like when Pelosi opposed an AI safety bill in 2024 that Wiener authored.
“They don’t know what they’re talking about,” Pelosi told KQED that year. “I find it insulting that they would equate politics with policy for the AI bill.”
She added, “It has nothing to do with elections. And my daughter and I haven’t even spoken about [the AI bill], because we want to get through this [national] election now.”
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Pelosi had officially declared her intention to run for reelection in November 2024 by filing the requisite paperwork. But she had not publicly said she was running. With Chakrabarti already months into his campaign, Wiener couldn’t wait much longer. In October 2025, days before the election when California voters would be asked to approve a gerrymandered map to potentially give Democrats five more congressional seats, Wiener announced that he would run for the seat.
A source in Pelosi’s orbit who asked not to be identified, say Pelosi was miffed that Wiener would announce then, drawing attention from what she saw as the greater national issue before voters: rallying Californians to approve the new map through Proposition 50. She had been traveling the state in support of the measure.
Wiener contends that he and Pelosi have long had a solid relationship. He said he is “eternally grateful” she endorsed him in his first run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors when few others did. He said they have worked together on legislation creating stronger state net neutrality protections in 2017 and, yes, differed when Pelosi opposed his AI safety measure.
“I’m a pro. Speaker Emerita Pelosi is a pro,” Wiener said. “We both want the San Francisco representative to help save our democracy and to get the country back on track. And I have every confidence that we’ll be able to work well together.”
Pelosi declined an interview request for this story.
Alexei Koseff contributed to this report.