Nancy Pelosi Struggles to Reach 218 Speaker of the House Votes

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, the top House Democrat and the only declared Democrat candidate for speaker, is reportedly having issues securing a majority of 218 votes in the new Congress that will be seated next year. That is the requisite number of members she needs to publicly cast votes for her on the Floor if she wants to regain the speaker’s gavel in the next Congress now that Democrats have retaken the House majority.

Pelosi, who served as speaker before Democrats lost the House to Republicans in the 2010 midterm elections in former President Barack Obama’s first term, weathered the storms of her conference and stayed atop the Democrat Party in the House for eight long years as House minority leader awaiting the return of Democrats to power. Now that the Democrats have regained the majority in the House in November’s midterm elections, a new majority will be seated in early January at the end of this current Congress, and Pelosi is the only declared candidate for speaker.

But just like her immediate successor, Republican and former Speaker John Boehner found out the hard way after three years of coup attempts by conservatives, the final of which was eventually successful in mid-2015, Pelosi needs to hold together at least 218 votes from a rambunctious and very divided conference with a diversity of viewpoints on everything from whether Democrats should impeach President Donald Trump to how Democrats should handle policy on matters like taxation, immigration, trade, national security, and more.

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