One week after House Democrats finished 0-for-4 in this special election season, their burst of frustration and pique vented toward Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi appears to have fizzled.

The vexation is not going to fade away altogether, however, and neither will the lawmakers’ whispered talk in the cloakrooms or after their nightly fundraisers about which of them has a plausible shot at someday becoming Pelosi’s successor.

How quickly the chatter turns into any concrete campaigning is open to conjecture. Probably, it is not at all imminent.

After about a dozen dissidents met last week to vent their displeasure at their current floor boss — identifying her polarizing liberalism as central to their dispiriting special election losses in Georgia and elsewhere — they emerged with no action items on their agenda, only agreement to keep voicing a view that the party’s leadership is all wrong for winning back the House majority.

None of the people in the room were willing to offer themselves as an alternative, at least not yet, underscoring how one of the oldest adages in electoral politics is “You can’t beat somebody with nobody.” And so far, there’s not even a single rival Pelosi has to contend with — let alone one she has to fear.