Key Pelosi Backers Face Electoral Demolition

The election of freshman Democrats in 2006 was crucial to the party gaining control of the House and thus giving Nancy Pelosi her job as House speaker in 2007. Indeed she called those freshmen “majority makers.” But now this group faces an early exit from Congress, The Hill reports.

Of 10 two-term Democratic congressmen running for re-election, six trail their Republican challengers, and two are in a dead heat, according to a poll by The Hill. So Pelosi could soon be saying goodbye to her speaker position.

“Out of the 10 districts of the second-term incumbents, only one of them is outside the margin of error,” said pollster Mark Penn of Penn Schoen Berland, which conducted the survey. “So virtually every one of these incumbents remains vulnerable.”

And the large pool of undecided voters in these districts is a bad omen for Democrats, as the undecided “typically will swing against an incumbent in these situations,” says Linda Fowler, a political science professor at Dartmouth College.