Dozen frustrated Dems face steep challenge to unseat Pelosi

During her press conference on Capitol Hill Thursday, Pelosi portrayed Democratic grumbling as opportunism.

The House minority leader has served as the face of House Democrats since she helped engineer her party regain control of the House of Representatives in 2007 to become the first female speaker.

Amidst disappointing recent Congressional losses, Democrats are calling for House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi to step down.

Representative Kathleen Rice of NY echoed these sentiments in calling for Pelosi and the entire Democratic leadership team to be replaced.

If losing a race Nate Silver gave you a 70 percent chance to win comes as “good news”, does repeatedly losing winnable special elections amount to really, really good news? “At some point, the coach has got to go, right?” said Rep.

On Morning Joe Thursday, Rep. Kathleen Rice, D-N.Y., had made a plea for Pelosi’s ouster.

While “it’s not necessarily her fault”, according to Democratic Rep. Tim Ryan of OH on NBC’s “Meet The Press”, “they spent, I would say, hundreds of millions of dollars against her. the reality is the fact that we have to go into 2018 with a leader who has been damaged”. When millions of people lost the health plans or doctors that President Obama promised they could keep, his supporters shrugged.

On Wednesday, some Democratic members of Congress publicly voiced concerns about Pelosi’s leadership, raising the specter of a leadership challenge.

It’s about all they can do.

“I’m in my 10th term and I certainly have never seen someone who is smarter in the kind of backroom maneuvering that Nancy Pelosi does”, said Rep. Jan Schakowsky, D-Ill. “But her time has come and gone”, Kathleen Rice, a Democratic congressman from NY, said on MSNBC yesterday morning. “It’s clear, that I think, across the board in the Democratic Party, we need new leadership”.

Republicans have spent eight years and tens of millions of dollars attacking Pelosi and making her a toxic figure among voters.

Some Democrats have blamed Pelosi for the party’s loss in the Georgia special election on Tuesday. It would literally be too late for Pelosi to announce her departure the day after the election.

Trump and Republican lawmakers have gloated over the wins, “but I think in private they’re actually very scared”, he said.

In South Carolina, the GOP similarly took pains to link Parnell and Pelosi – even as Parnell campaigned with Tim Ryan, the OH congressman who challenged Pelosi for minority leadership in November. “It’s called democracy. Duh, that’s not news”, Pelosi said. “But when they go off on identity politics and ‘Russia, Russia, Russia, ‘ they lose”.

But Handel won the race, which turned out to be the most expensive House race in history, and now some elected Democrats around the country are pointing their finger at Pelosi. Again, Republicans refused to support the bill, and conservative activists raised hell in town hall meetings with Democratic representatives, telling them to “kill the bill”.

Unfortunately for those Democrats, says Brad Gomez, associate professor of political science at Florida State University and the co-author of a 2007 study on the weather’s impact on presidential elections, they can’t explain away Ossoff’s loss so easily.

“You know you can sit here and we’ll talk about Russian Federation all day long today on Capitol Hill and in Washington. People in OH don’t grab me about Russian Federation at all when I’m home”, Ryan said.

Massachusetts Democratic Rep. Seth Moulton, another outspoken critic, also attended, according to sources – and some in the group continue to point to the Iraq war veteran as a young member who could be cultivated to run.

While there once were ways for Democrats to win the House without Republican leaning districts, that is no longer the case. She is one of the party’s top fund-raisers, and jettisoning the party’s most prominent female leader risks alienating liberal partisans who admire her. “We’re a family. We’re going to have those discussions”.