As Twitchy told you, 16 Democrats (including Ben McAdams, who may very well wind up having lost his race to Mia Love) have signed onto a letter calling for “new leadership” in the House. In other words, they want to take Nancy Pelosi’s Speaker’s gavel away. 
 
 Their efforts may very well turn out to be all for naught, and at what cost? When all is said and done, Nancy Pelosi has a good chance of holding onto her Speakership, and House Democrats may have exposed themselves as racist sexists: 
 
 Lot of white men on this list. Just saying. https://t.co/k8173Z1KVp — Pradheep J. Shanker, M.D., M.S. (@Neoavatara) November 19, 2018 
 
 Indeed: 
 
 NEW: Anti-Pelosi letter just dropped – 16 Democrats (not 17 as previously reported) have signed on pic.twitter.com/3jq4WtgSwA — Elaina Plott (@elainaplott) November 19, 2018 
 
 Only two women in the whole bunch? Sad. 

 The threat by Nancy Pelosi’s critics — whom some on Capitol Hill have dubbed the “rebels” or the “revolutionaries" — has the potential to throw the entire party into chaos. | Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images Congress Pelosi’s bid for speaker imperiled as public opposition grows Sixteen Democrats released a letter promising to vote against the California Democrat on the House floor. 
 
 Sixteen Democrats vowed Monday to oppose Nancy Pelosi for speaker on the House floor, throwing the California Democrat’s bid to reclaim the gavel in serious jeopardy. 
 
 In a highly anticipated letter that went public Monday, the Democrats praised Pelosi as “a historic figure" but argued that it is time for change at the top. 
 
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 “Our majority came on the backs of candidates who said that they would support new leadership because voters in hard-won districts, and across the country, want to see real change in Washington," the group of Democrats said in the letter. "We promised to change the status quo, and we intend to deliver on that promise." 
 
 The show of force underscores the depth of the challenge facing Pelosi, who has led the caucus for 16 years. Pelosi needs 218 votes among lawmakers present and voting to be elected speaker on Jan. 3. House Democrats have won 233 seats, meaning Pelosi can currently afford to lose only 15 votes. 
 
 The letter includes 11 incumbents, four incoming freshman and one candidate, Ben McAdams of Utah, whose race has not been called. 
 
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 The letter does not include at least three additional Democratic lawmakers or members-elect who have confirmed to POLITICO that they intend to oppose Pelosi on the floor: Rep. Conor Lamb of Pennsylvania, Abigail Spanberger of Virginia and Jason Crow of Colorado. 
 
 That would bring Pelosi’s opponents to a total of 19 members or members-elect committed to voting against her — enough to keep her from becoming speaker should those members refuse to budge. 
 
 Three House races in Utah, Georgia and Texas have not been called but are trending toward the Republican incumbents. Should Democrats prevail, Pelosi could have more wiggle room and could lose as many as 18 votes. 
 
 Pelosi has defiantly said she will win a speaker vote and has no intention of withdrawing. Her allies predict she will take this fight all the way to the House floor and will wear down her opponents. 
 
 “Leader Pelosi remains confident in her support among members and members-elect,” Pelosi spokesman Drew Hammill said in response, noting that 94 percent of the caucus didn’t sign onto the letter. 
 
 Monday’s letter, however, suggests that Pelosi’s pressure campaign to wrestle the needed votes has so far fallen short, though her allies note that they still have more than a month to crank up the heat and get these critics in line. 
 
 Rep. Kathleen Rice (D-N.Y.), one of the group's ringleaders, dismissed the criticism that only a handful of caucus members publicly signed onto the letter. Rice told POLITICO that Pelosi is likely to win a closed-door caucus vote next week — which only requires a majority of members to vote in her favor — but that the members vowing to oppose the California Democrat plan to stand firm on the floor. 
 
 "The fact of the matter is she might get the overwhelming votes of the caucus votes but there are enough votes to stop her from becoming speaker — and that’s really all that matters," Rice said of Pelosi. "And she knows that." 
 
 In addition to Rice, letter signers are Democratic Reps. Tim Ryan (Ohio), Seth Moulton (Massachusetts), Ed Perlmutter (Colorado), Kurt Schrader (Oregon), Filemon Vela (Texas), Bill Foster (Illinois), Brian Higgins (New York), Stephen Lynch (Massachusetts), Linda Sánchez (California) and Jim Cooper (Tennessee), as well as Reps.-elect Jeff Van Drew (New Jersey), Joe Cunningham (South Carolina), Max Rose and Anthony Brindisi of New York, and candidate McAdams. 
 
 Pelosi has isolated some threats against her. Several dozen Democratic candidates, for example, ran and were elected on a promise to oppose her or back “new leadership.” Pelosi has been meeting with these members and appears to be making gains with a group of them. 
 
 Rep. Mikie Sherrill of New Jersey, for example, vowed during the campaign to oppose Pelosi, even running a commercial saying so. But Pelosi’s allies have been working on Sherrill, who no longer publicly reiterates those intentions. 
 
 Additionally, Pelosi's critics had been trying for weeks to garner 20 signatories on their letter. They fell short of their own goal by four names — five if McAdams is excluded. 
 
 Still there's no denying the gravity of the predicament before Pelosi. And simple math suggests that the minority leader will have to cut some sort of deal with her critics. 
 
 Many of the letter’s signers have told POLITICO that nothing can make them change their mind — no plum committee posts or chairmanship, as have been used as a carrot for Pelosi critics in the past. Van Drew told POLITICO last week that he would not change his mind for anything. 
 
 "I expressed my view, and I’m not going to be voting for her — not in caucus and not on the floor," he said. 
 
 But Rep. Marcia Fudge of Ohio, a Pelosi critic who is considering a bid for speaker as well, suggested to POLITICO in a Friday interview that Pelosi could possibly win her support should the Californian declare that she will serve for only one more term. Fudge had signed an earlier version of the letter but apparently has withdrawn her signature; she was not on the letter released Monday. 
 
 “We talked about some succession plan," Fudge said after meeting with Pelosi on Friday to discuss her potential challenge to the leader. Senior members of the Congressional Black Caucus were trying to broker peace between the two. “I’d like to know what her plans are [for retirement]. She did not share them with me. But I think that it is something that our caucus is interested in finding out.” 
 
 The threat by Pelosi’s critics — whom some on Capitol Hill have dubbed the “rebels” or the “revolutionaries” — has the potential to throw the entire party into chaos just as Democrats are trying to turn their fire on President Donald Trump and pivot toward ousting him in 2020. 
 
 It's irritated many in the caucus who say they should be fighting Republicans, not each other, and who argue that Pelosi has the know-how to lead the party at such a critical time. 
 
 But Pelosi opponents say she has hindered the party and will put newly elected members in red or purple districts in political jeopardy should she force incoming freshmen to vote for her. 
 
 "This is where we stand, this is how we’re going to vote. We heard the voters on Nov. 6, and we are going to help bring about change, even if it comes at some political cost here to us in Washington," Rice said. 
 
 

 “You have some of the institutional members say, ‘Who are these upstarts?’ ” one of these younger Democrats, Representative Beto O’Rourke of Texas, who was elected in 2012, told me in 2015. “One member of Congress compared us to spoiled kids, like teenagers who want a car on their 16th birthday. But you look at my class: Tulsi Gabbard, she’s not going to stay in the House for long — she’ll run for governor. Joe Kennedy, the same. Pat Murphy, the same. And they’re all talented, ambitious and good fund-raisers. I’ve just got to think that when you see that 20-year road to be in a position of consequence, other options look a lot more attractive.” O’Rourke, of course, left this year to pursue those other options, following his fellow erstwhile rising House stars Xavier Becerra (who was appointed attorney general of California in 2017) and Kyrsten Sinema (whom Arizona elected to the Senate this month). 
 
 The growing unease born of being in the minority was not confined to these members, however. “She faces more division in her caucus than she ever had before,” the former Pelosi aide told me. After the disastrous 2010 midterms, Heath Shuler, a Blue Dog moderate from North Carolina, decided to run against her for minority leader. Following the devastation of the 2016 election, another centrist, Tim Ryan of Ohio, challenged her as well. Neither Shuler nor Ryan made much pretense of being a Pelosi-caliber legislative tactician. Their candidacies were more based on what they were not: not from San Francisco, not liberal. They were also not skilled vote-counters. Shuler managed to collect just 43 of the Democratic caucus’s 193 votes; six years later, Ryan took 63, to Pelosi’s 134. 
 
 Still, by the time of Ryan’s challenge to Pelosi’s leadership in November 2016, several Democrats were no longer hiding their dissatisfaction — itself a sign of Pelosi’s diminished power. She responded by creating new leadership posts and appointed three young members — Cheri Bustos of Illinois, Hakeem Jeffries of New York and David Cicilline of Rhode Island — to oversee a “rebranding” of the party that was more an exercise in inclusiveness than a substantive reimagination. She also began assuring members that she did not intend to stick around forever. She insisted publicly, for example, that had Hillary Clinton won, Pelosi would have felt that the Democrats no longer required her stewardship. 
 
 Many doubted this claim, including former staff members with whom I spoke. Her closest political confidant, George Miller, told me that Pelosi had never made such an indication to him. Further, the minority leader’s recent assertion that it was important for her to stay so that the American public would have “a woman at the table” struck some in her caucus as disingenuous, given that Pelosi’s perceived favorites to succeed her throughout the years — Chris Van Hollen, Steve Israel of New York, Xavier Becerra and most recently Joe Crowley, who was beaten in a primary upset in New York this year by the Democratic Socialist first-time candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez — were all men. 
 
 But, Pelosi knew, nothing would mollify her caucus like victory. In paving a road back to the majority, she returned to the playbook that worked for her last time. “The first thing we had to do in 2005 was take the president’s numbers down,” Pelosi told me, referring to Bush’s approval rating. “Bush was 57 percent in early 2005.” The moment Bush introduced the idea of partly privatizing Social Security, Pelosi’s Democrats pounced and began attacking the scheme as an assault on senior citizens. “His numbers came down to 38 in the fall,” she recalled, “and that’s when the retirements started to happen” — nervous Republican congressmen who decided to vacate their seats. 
 
 Because Trump began his presidency as a polarizing force even within his own party, Pelosi said, the Democrats were best served by standing back while one fainthearted Republican House member after the next, facing variously a Trump-adoring base or a Trump-inspired anti-Republican backlash, announced their retirements — 39 House and Senate members in all. The new Democratic candidates by and large stuck to the disciplined campaign message prescribed by Pelosi’s rebranding efforts: protecting health care, advocating better jobs and wages through infrastructure improvements, restoring integrity to government. By the fall of 2018, some pundits criticized the Democratic field for not pounding away on Trump. Pelosi’s view, she recalled, was: “Yeah, that’s what Hillary did, not what we’re doing.” 
 
 With the threat of a blue wave becoming more real by the week in 2018, the Republicans returned to the formula that had served them so well over the past decade. According to an analysis by The Wall Street Journal, more than 135,600 House and Senate ads in the 2018 cycle mentioned Pelosi “in an entirely negative context.” Navigating these headwinds was easier in some places than in others. The Second Congressional District of Virginia, for example, had been in G.O.P. hands since 2010, when Republicans successfully tagged the Democratic incumbent, Glenn Nye — a moderate whose voting record was ranked the ninth most independent in the entire House — as “Pelosi’s congressman.” Nye told me after the 2010 election that although Pelosi generously raised funds on his behalf, he still blamed her in part for his defeat. “My feeling was kind of, a better way to help would have been to help me with the environment. Because the environment” — by which he meant the liberal aura of Nancy Pelosi — “defeated me more than anything else.”
– Nancy Pelosi continues to face a revolt from within her own party. Sixteen House Democrats released a letter Monday vowing not to vote for her as speaker, the Washington Post reports. It's unclear exactly how many Democrat votes Pelosi will need to prevail in her bid to once again serve as speaker of the House, since four races remain undecided; if the current leads hold in those races, Democrats (who are currently confirmed to have won 232 seats) will have won 233 seats. That's a 16-seat majority, meaning Pelosi could only afford to lose 15 Democrat votes. The Post does more math: One of the letter's signers, Ben McAdams, is actually trailing his Republican opponent and may not end up getting a vote; but there are also at least six other Democrats who have publicly expressed opposition to Pelosi but did not sign the letter. "We are thankful to Leader Pelosi for her years of service to our Country and to our Caucus," the group of 16 writes. "However, we also recognize that in this recent election, Democrats ran on and won on a message of change." It continues, "Our majority came on the backs of candidates who said that they would support new leadership because voters in hard-won districts, and across the country, want to see real change in Washington. We promised to change the status quo, and we intend to deliver on that promise." Politico frames Pelosi's speaker bid as being "in serious jeopardy," but not everyone is convinced; allies predict Pelosi will "wear down" her opponents. Twitchy, meanwhile, calls the letter "problematic" and notes that just two women signed it. In related news, the New York Times is out Monday with an extensive profile of Pelosi, who is known as someone you don't want to cross. (On day one of orientation, a protest at Pelosi's office.)