Speaking on the sidelines of the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., appeared to blame New York Gov. Kathy Hochul’s 2022 reelection campaign for dragging down Democratic House candidates statewide and thus in part costing the party their majority in Washington.

In the 2022 midterms, Republicans flipped four Democratic-held seats in New York and won another close race by less than a percentage point. All were districts that voted for President Joe Biden in 2020, but voted for Lee Zeldin, the Republican gubernatorial candidate, that year.

“Five seats in New York,” Pelosi said at a Politico/CNN event, when asked about how House Democrats lost their slim majority.

When asked by the moderator of the conversation what happened, she replied: “I think it related to the gubernatorial race.”

Pelosi has said as much in the past, telling freshman Republican Rep. Mike Lawler at Biden’s State of the Union this year that he should thank Hochul for helping him win his 2022 race against House Democrats’ campaign chief Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney. Two months after the 2022 election she told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that “the governor didn’t realize soon enough where the trouble was.”

When asked on Thursday, Pelosi said she hadn’t spoken to Hochul about congressional races in New York this cycle, saying she’s only spoken to House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, her successor. She said they spoke “as recently as this morning” about the New York House races.

“No, I've spoken to the future speaker Hakeem Jeffries about it,” Pelosi said. “We’re optimistic about our races. We will mobilize to win on the ground. We'll message progressive, bold, but non-menacing, unifying to the country. And we will have the money -- the three M's: mobilization, message, money.”

A former one-term House member and a two-term lieutenant governor, Hochul ran for governor in 2022 as the incumbent, having replaced longtime Gov. Andrew Cuomo after he resigned facing a slew of sexual misconduct allegations. But 2022 was her first time atop the ticket and she underperformed against Zeldin in a race defined by debate over how to handle crime. Hochul won by around six percentage points, with Zeldin’s 46.8% marking the highest GOP vote share in two decades.

“That’s a convenient narrative for some people. It’s just not accurate. The crime issue was already an issue the year before,” Hochul told Spectrum News at the convention on Wednesday, pointing to Democratic losses in local races in 2021. “The narrative about crime had taken hold. That’s not something that was our responsibility. We talked about public safety. We worked on those issues.”

She then pointed to “vetting issues” in the race now-disgraced former Rep. George Santos won -- “nothing to do with the governor” -- and “the challenges” Maloney had when Republicans brought up previous support for bail reform. 

“I lost my seat in Congress, nobody blamed the governor at the time,” she added.

Spectrum News' Kevin Frey contributed to this report.