Vox.com — By Matthew Yglesias — July 3, 2017 —
Restive Democrats are complaining again: Nancy Pelosi is making it hard for them to win elections. Her time is up.
The charge is led this time by a small band of mostly younger members who see Jon Ossoff’s defeat in a Georgia special election as an indictment of the longtime party leader and a moment when the future of the party is in serious doubt.
“It’s time for Nancy Pelosi to go, and the entire leadership team,” said Rep. Kathleen Rice.
Massachusetts Rep. Seth Moulton, perhaps the most vocal anti-Pelosi Democrat, said last week that “we as Democrats have to come to terms with the fact that we lost again,” before calling for “a new generation of leadership.”
Congressional Democrats have lost a lot lately. They suffered wave elections against them in 2010 and 2014, gained only small numbers of seats in 2012 and 2016, and have gone 0 for 4 in efforts to poach red seats from the GOP in post-Trump special elections.
Trump’s high disapproval ratings are the party’s best chance, they believe, to retake the House. But anti-Pelosi ads are hard to escape — and some Democrats worry that having a party leader with a baked-in underwater approval rating neutralized the natural advantages of opposition.
A lot of the disagreement around Pelosi among the chattering classes basically comes down to a disagreement about default assumptions. If you assume that a legislative leader is going to stay on as long as he or she wants to, then the case against Pelosi is not ultimately all that compelling. It’s true that her poll numbers are bad and that Republicans like to feature her in ads to motivate their base. But it’s also true that basically all legislative caucus leaders have bad poll numbers (Congress is perennially unpopular) and that any Democratic leader would likely be featured in ads designed to motivate the GOP base.
At the same time, the reality is that what Pelosi is trying to pull off is actually quite unusual.
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