Trump backs Pelosi for speaker. She’ll win anyway

Rep. Nancy Pelosi nailed it when she predicted a week before the election that Democrats would win back the House.

Even the doubters now have to admit: She knows her stuff.

President Trump, of all people, acknowledged that her hard work had earned her the right to be the next speaker. I’m not sure how much weight a Trump endorsement is going to carry with Democratic lawmakers. But I’m going out on a limb and predicting that when the caucus votes Nov. 28, Pelosi is going to win the party leader’s post.

That’s going to make her the most powerful Democrat in D.C. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer lost seats in the election, while Pelosi won them. He can be her Uber driver.

Of course, Pelosi isn’t the only California Democrat who’s moving up. Reps. Adam Schiff of Burbank and Maxine Waters of Los Angeles will chair committees that can make Trump’s life hard. Our own East Bay Rep. Eric Swalwell, who is looking hard at a run for president, will be a leading voice in Trump investigations as well.

But don’t expect any serious moves toward impeaching the president.

For starters, it’s a waste of time: The GOP-run Senate would never convict. And Pelosi is smart enough to know that it’s in Democrats’ best interest for Trump to be president in 2020 and not Mike Pence.

After all, Trump himself said the midterms were a referendum on him, and Republicans’ House losses look like they’ll be north of 30 seats. Imagine the bloodletting when Trump is actually on the ballot.

Kavanaugh kickback: Democratic losses in the Senate — three seats for sure, maybe four, with one and perhaps two pickups — may be the result of the debacle that was the Brett Kavanaugh confirmation process.

Republicans in the heartland had not been feeling particularly motivated to get out and vote. Then came the Senate Judiciary Committee’s hearings for Kavanaugh’s Supreme Court nomination, the allegations of his attempted rape as a teenager and the resultant Democratic pile-on.

For Republicans, that turned Kavanaugh into a victim. And they got mad.

One of the more interesting places the Kavanaugh kickback showed itself was here in California in the race for U.S. Senate between Sen. Dianne Feinstein and fellow Democrat state Sen. Kevin de León.

De León, who ran to Feinstein’s left, actually won far more counties than Feinstein did, even though he lost the race by nearly 10 points. And all those counties were in places where the Republican Party still has strength — away from the Bay Area and Los Angeles.

It’s not like de León is well known in those places. I asked some of my Republican friends in red areas how they’d voted.

“I voted against Dianne. I voted for the Italian guy,” one said.

“I voted for the French guy,” another said.

They had no idea that de León is Latino, let alone that he’s the guy who wrote California’s sanctuary state law.

Maybe it is a new day.

Benioff force: Years ago, former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg began spending money all over the country to help good causes. Now the billionaire is being looked at as presidential material.

Could this be an avenue for Salesforce founder Marc Benioff?

His multimillion-dollar campaign to pass San Francisco’s initiative to tax businesses for homeless services, Proposition C, put him at odds with fellow tech titan Jack Dorsey.

But also put him in the national spotlight as leader in the movement for corporate social responsibility.

Plus, Benioff has a sense of humor and a personality that doesn’t repel people, two things we could use more of in politics.

Thank you: John Konstin and others hosted the election day lunch at John’s Grill, and there’s never been a better one. More than 1,000 people of all walks of life walked through just to see who showed up.

This one must have cost Konstin a fortune in key lime pie alone.

Sea change: In conversation at Kokkari with a couple of surfers, I asked, “What do you call a blue wave in surfing?”

The answer was very simple: Unless it’s a major wave, it’s a blue micro.

Clearly, this election cycle for Democrats was, at best, a blue micro.

Want to sound off? Email wbrown@sfchronicle.com