As some call for generational change, other say the trailblazing House speaker is exactly what the party needs now

At a weekly press conference on Capitol Hill earlier this year, Nancy Pelosi, the Democratic leader, answered questions about impeachment, a potential cabinet secretary nominee and a primary race in Colorado.

When it finished, she pulled a chair in front of the lectern and sat down to answer another round of questions from reporters’ children in what has become a tradition on Take Your Child To Work Day.

A curly-haired girl in a pink dress shot her hand in the air.

“How did you get your job?” she asked with a sing-song lilt.

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Pelosi, the nation’s first female speaker of the House and the highest-ranking woman in American political history, considered the question.

“How I got to be a leader in the Democratic party was because my colleagues voted for me,” she said. “That’s how.”

Now, after a nearly 16-year reign atop the Democratic caucus, Pelosi, 78, is once more asking her colleagues for support as she faces perhaps her strongest resistance yet.

A coalition of Democratic incumbents and newcomers are demanding generational changes to party leadership – and say they have enough support to deny Pelosi the speakership. In a tactic borrowed from the House Freedom Caucus, the band of arch-conservatives who played a key role in forcing out the Republican House Speaker, John Boehner, the Democratic rebels insist they’re prepared to bring the fight to the House floor if she doesn’t step aside.

“We need to be prepared for what’s going to happen when she can’t get to 218,” said the Ohio congressman Tim Ryan, a Democrat who challenged her for the speakership in 2016, referencing the necessary amount of votes Pelosi must secure if all Republicans vote against her.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nancy Pelosi, 78, is the highest ranking woman in US political history. Photograph: Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images

Pelosi remains unbowed and fully confident she will be the next speaker of the house.

“I have overwhelming support in my caucus to be speaker of the House,” she told reporters at a weekly press conference on Thursday.

So far, no Democrat has officially challenged Pelosi for the gavel and she has welcomed a challenge.

“Come on in, the water’s warm,” she told reporters.

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Democrats have hailed Pelosi as “an architect of the recent midterm success”, pointing to her fundraising prowess – she raised a stunning $121.7m during the 2018 cycle – and her decision to deliver a disciplined message on healthcare. In a twist, eight years after Republicans won the House majority on a promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act, House Democratic candidates hammered their opponents for trying to repeal the law’s most popular protections.

“You don’t fire the coach after you win the Super Bowl,” Nadeam Elshami, Pelosi’s former chief of staff said during a recent Politico Live event.

This is hardly the first time Washington has wondered whether Pelosi’s days are numbered. But the drumbeat intensified this year, especially after Democrat Conor Lamb won a shock victory in a House special election in March with a vow to never support her for speaker. During the midterm elections, several Democratic hopefuls running in districts where Pelosi’s image is toxic adopted the strategy.

But Pelosi encouraged Democrats to do whatever they needed to do to win, adopting the mantra “just win, baby, win”.

At least nine Democrats who ran against Pelosi did win and will have the opportunity to make good on that pledge later this month.

She has been integrally involved in some of the biggest political and moral struggles of her time Jamie Raskin

Pelosi will face her first real test in a secret, closed-door ballot on 28 November, when the Democratic caucus elects its leadership team. Pelosi is expected to easily win the simple-majority vote. But the margin will serve as an indication of whether she has the support to win on the floor.

The effort to replace Pelosi has been charged with accusations of misogyny and sexism. Her supporters have questioned the logic of trying to oust the nation’s first female speaker after she helped usher in a historic class of women that returned the party to the majority for the first time in eight years.

Conscious of the optics, the group, which includes some female critics, have sharply rejected the accusation, insisting this is about new leadership, not gender.

Pelosi has represented San Francisco since 1987, but her political savvy was honed in the Little Italy neighborhood of Baltimore. One of six children and the only daughter of Thomas D’Alesandro, a legendary congressman and mayor, she learned an old-school style of politics that prioritizes loyalty and favors.

Republicans have spent unknowable amounts of money to turn Pelosi into a villain on the campaign trail. Attack ads demonize her as the archetypal “coastal elite”, a wealthy liberal from deep-blue San Francisco.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nancy Pelosi makes remarks a day after the midterm elections. Photograph: Mike Theiler/Reuters

And yet for years House Democrats have remained loyal to Pelosi, said Cindy Simon Rosenthal, the co-author of the 2010 book Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the New American Politics.

Her vulnerability this year, Rosenthal said, is not an indictment of Pelosi’s leadership but a reflection of how Republicans have “so successfully demonized her that it is politically untenable for the Democrats in those districts”.

Pelosi has said she is planning for a “transitional” speakership but has declined to offer a timeline – a commitment her critics say would ease their concern.

Pelosi’s supporters and critics in both parties consider her a “master legislator”, a shrewd political tactician and one of the most effective speakers in modern times. It was her stewardship that secured a bank bailout to halt the global financial crisis at the end of George W Bush’s presidency. Under Barack Obama, Democrats moved an ambitious domestic agenda in 2008, that included the Affordable Care Act, stimulus spending and climate change regulations.

“She has been integrally involved in some of the biggest political and moral struggles of her time and she bears all of the scars from that,” said he Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin, who supports Pelosi. “She’s the perfect person given her experience and her political savvy to usher in a new age of Democratic leadership.”