Speaker Pelosi, Round Two?

A return of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi isn’t yet a sure thing. But it’s certainly looking more likely.

The biggest obstacle to Pelosi’s second stint as speaker is whether the Democrats can win 218 seats in the House next month. Based on all the available information, that’s still a good bet. Nate Silver’s forecast, based mainly on polling, now gives the Democrats an 85 percent chance at a majority, the highest probability since he began tracking in August. Four models from political scientists based on election fundamentals predict a Democratic majority as well. Experts who follow individual races also see Democrats with a clear edge.

Despite all this, it’s possible that Republicans could still retain a slim majority. If they do, there’s a general assumption that Pelosi wouldn’t seek another term as minority leader — and it’s not clear that she’d win if she tried. A lot of Democrats would blame her if the party falls short.

But if the Democrats do win, I’d be very surprised if she isn’t the next speaker. For one thing, if Democrats are in position to choose a speaker, that will mean that all the Republican attacks against Pelosi during the campaign didn’t hurt them enough to matter. Parties rarely punish their leaders after winning, and even if criticism of Pelosi cost some candidates their elections, everyone who is voting in the Democratic caucus will have survived those attacks.

It’s true that plenty of Democratic candidates also criticized Pelosi during the campaign, and that some have even vowed not to vote for her. But remember that there are two votes for speaker — first a private one within the party caucus to select a candidate, then a public one on the House floor in which the choices are the Democratic and Republican leaders. Democrats who have pledged to vote against Pelosi can do so in the caucus, where she only needs a majority within the party, and then vote for her on the House floor instead of whoever the Republican minority leader will be (once they’ve selected a replacement for the retiring Paul Ryan).

Pelosi is also running a good insider campaign, so far as we can tell from the outside. She’s taken to saying that she’ll only keep the job for a short while, which should help hold off challenges from ambitious colleagues and reassure members from marginal districts who might be worried about how she’d affect the next election. In fact, it’s probably better for them to have a retiring speaker going into an election — linking them to her won’t carry as strong a punch, and Republican attacks on the next Democratic leader won’t yet have begun.

Pelosi remains an underrated politician. If she does become speaker again, Democrats will be lucky to have her.

1. Erica Chenoweth and Jeremy Pressman at the Monkey Cage have their latest estimate on protests and participation.

2. Kathryn Dunn Tenpas on the unprecedented turnover in the White House.

3. Some local politics: Peter F. Burns Jr. and Matthew O. Thomas explore the elections in Anaheim, with Disney’s treatment on the line.

4. My Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Feldman on the new path to the federal bench.

5. Stan Collender on why no one should take Trump’s promise of a new tax cut seriously.

6. And an excellent thread from Danielle Kurtzleben arguing that I botched my reading of a Joe Manchin ad because I ignored the gender politics. Quite right! Manchin isn’t just promising to be from West Virginia; he’s promising, implicitly, to be a man in office, or at least a certain kind of man — the kind of man valued by football and basketball icons. And what politicians promise has implications for how they will act in office. A good catch of my lazy reading.

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