Leadership’s response to the Georgia loss drove in-caucus critics even crazier. “Part of the frustration was the response of, ‘Well, we did better than we thought we were going to do,’” says Ohio’s Tim Ryan, who ran a long-shot bid to unseat Pelosi in last December’s leadership race. (He pulled nearly a third of the caucus, exposing real restlessness among the troops.). “Where I come from, that doesn’t cut it. I tried to think of saying something like that to one of my old football coaches in northeast Ohio. ‘Coach, we almost won. Didn’t we do great? We almost beat ‘em!’ I don’t even want to think of want they would have done if we’d said that.”

Indeed, post-Georgia, there has been a flurry of media reports about the swelling size and brazenness of the boot-Pelosi contingent. Massachusetts’s Seth Moulton set tongues wagging when he tweet-slammed his party for ignoring the reality that “business as usual isn’t working” and began publicly calling for new leadership. Two days after the election, Moulton joined Rice and Ryan in co-hosting a meeting for colleagues looking to discuss possible paths to such a change. Twenty members were invited. A dozen or so showed up. Others reportedly chickened out after news of the gathering leaked early. (One crosses Pelosi at one’s peril.)

The roots of such disgruntlement are no mystery. It is, in part, a question of basic math. Pelosi has been her party’s floor leader for 14 years. (She is the second-longest-serving House Democratic leader ever.) During her reign, the GOP has spent countless millions demonizing her as a loony lefty from freak-show San Francisco and tying her around the necks of every Democratic House candidate from Wasilla to Weeki Wachee. Fair or not, this approach has proved impressively effective outside of deep-blue enclaves. (Again: Georgia’s sixth.)

As Rice and others see it, one of the scariest questions that Democratic congressional candidates will face in the midterms will be: “If you get elected, will you vote Nancy Pelosi for leader?”

“This is not personal to Nancy at all,” insists Rice. “She has become the piñata so to speak, because she has been there for a long time. She has come to represent, even though it's not accurate, everything that’s wrong with the Democratic Party.”

“They’ve made a hell of an investment in it,” says Ryan of the GOP’s vilification of Pelosi. And that investment just keeps paying off, he notes. “Why make it easy for them?”

More broadly, say critics, Pelosi’s long tenure complicates her team’s struggle to win back the legions of voters who feel abandoned by the party. “Democrats have to come up with a new message, especially on economics. And if that message is going to be effective, our top messenger can’t be someone who has been in power 15 years,” insists Rice. “That’s not a criticism. It’s just reality. When a company launches a new branding campaign after few bad years, they don’t hire as their new spokesperson the one they had been using before.”