Pelosi: 'I feel better' about chances to retake the House thanks to Romney

Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Wednesday that strong evidence of a gender-based support disparity between Republicans and Democrats makes her feel "better" about the chances for Democrats to retake the House in November.

Pelosi ranked the chances as better than 50-50.

"I've always felt good about it," she said Wednesday in San Francisco, according to the San Francisco Chronicle. "But now I feel better."

The war between President Obama and Mitt Romney over female voters intensified this week, with Romney asserting that 92 percent of the jobs lost under Obama were women's jobs, and Obama and the Democratic National Committee firing back that Romney's campaign couldn't even answer whether he supported a major piece of equal-pay legislation.

"I would have said, two months ago, we had a 50-50 chance of winning the House," Pelosi said.

"Since then, so much changed because women have shifted in large measure to the president and to the Democrats," she continued. Democrats have hammered Republicans for waging a "war on women" through their policy positions on the White House contraception mandate, among other things, and seemed to be gaining an edge according to recent surveys such as Gallup's poll of 12 swing states this month that showed Obama with an 18 percent lead over Romney among women.

Pelosi also defended Obama from Romney's assertion that female unemployment has skyrocketed under his administration. 

"If this is an example of how Mitt Romney is going to run for president, I feel sad for the process and country, because either he doesn't know what the facts are or he doesn't care," she said. Romney's statistic represents jobs lost since January 2009, but has been criticized as only accounting for a selective portion of the economic collapse.

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