Now she needs to whip the votes to make it final.
It’s official: Nancy Pelosi is Democrats’ nominee for House speaker. But the speakership race is far from over.
House Democrats overwhelmingly voted to pick Pelosi as their leader going into the final January 3 House speaker vote, with 203 in favor of her to 32 against. Three members did not vote, and Rep. Patrick Maloney, who has said he plans to support Pelosi, was absent due to illness. Pelosi ran unopposed.
To become speaker, Pelosi needs to win 218 votes on the House floor, where both Republicans and Democrats will vote. And by the looks of the Democratic conference vote, she still needs to do some convincing within her own ranks.
It’s hard to extrapolate much from the conference vote. Pelosi had more support for speaker this year than she did in 2016 for the minority leader job, when she lost 63 votes to relative unknown Rep. Tim Ryan (OH), a moderate Democrat who decided not to run against Pelosi again. And it’s very likely lawmakers will flip their vote on the House floor, when the stakes are higher.
