Despite an Election Day disaster — six House seats lost and potentially up to a dozen when all the votes are tabulated — Speaker Nancy Pelosi will likely fend off a challenge from a band of disgruntled Democrats and secure another term as leader.

With Joe Biden in the White House and Mitch McConnell as Senate majority leader, though, she cannot fend off the reality that she’s been marginalized. Her craving for power may have been sated, but she will be relegated to a secondary role in achieving the new president’s agenda.

For President Biden, the fulfillment of his campaign pledges runs through the Senator from Kentucky, assuming at least one of the two Republican Senate candidates win run-off elections in Georgia in January.

While Pelosi will continue to have a voice, it will be a muted one,  unlike the megaphone she wielded for the past four years belaboring President Trump and exercising what she was convinced was a brilliant political and campaign strategy.

Her strategy — campaign as the anti-Trump — crashed and burned in a spectacular fashion, an outcome predicted by vulnerable Democrats who warned of widespread discontent in their districts over failure to enact a COVID-19 relief package prior to the election.

They were left with little to brag about in the way of accomplishment, opening the way for Republican opponents to associate them with the radical themes pushed by the party’s left wing.

In a post-election caucus, angry Democrats turned their fire on Pelosi, blaming her and her  team for failing to respond aggressively to accusations of turning the country toward socialism, de-funding police departments, phasing out the oil and gas industry with a resultant loss of thousands of jobs and appearing to side with violent protestors in the streets of major cities.

Even House Majority Whip James Clyburn of South Carolina blamed the de-funding law enforcement movement for harming Democratic candidates.

Pelosi offered a worn-out cliché defense: “we lost the battle but won the war.”  That’s what losers say when they attempt to convince others they didn’t really lose.  Historically, it hasn’t worked and it won’t mollify Pelosi’s critics, either.

The Speaker will also be put to the test by the very public and rancorous split in party ranks, pitting the small but exceedingly vocal band of progressives against the larger centrist bloc, each blaming the other for the poor election day showing and demanding a tactical change in strategy to more closely reflect their point of view.

It will be, though, Pelosi’s diminished stature and weakened influence that will be felt as the new Administration and Congress assume office in January.

McConnell has emerged as the second strongest figure in Washington, next only to the president.

Biden understands that whatever he desires — nominations, spending, social programs — can only be had by cooperation with McConnell.  He realizes the Senator is all that stands between the House giving in to its far left impulses and placing the presidency in an uncomfortable and potentially embarrassing position.

Bluntly put, Biden needs McConnell more than he needs Pelosi.

Biden is a classic centrist whose 47-year career in government was a model of compromise, seeking common ground and sharing in the credit.

Even in his rather unorthodox campaign from the basement of his home in Wilmington, he resisted the siren call of the far left and he is committed to a moderate center/left Administration.

The Supreme Court, for instance, will remain at nine members and the Green New Deal will follow autumn weather leaves turning to yellow and then dead brown.

The Administration will rely on Pelosi to keep her more rebellious members under control while, at the same time, guaranteeing majority support for the Biden agenda.

Her role will be dramatically different from the one to which she’s become accustomed. She will be expected to loyally follow the Administration path rather than charting it, to shift from constant critic to buoyant cheerleader, and to be the dependable, reliable policy and party advocate.

She will be charged with keeping the progressives from going rogue and attacking the Administration for failing to move significantly more to the left and embrace Medicare for all, abolition of the Electoral College, granting statehood to Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia, providing government jobs to the unemployed, cancelling student debt, raising taxes on corporations and billionaires, and reallocating money from law enforcement to social service programs.

Led by New York Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, “the squad” has made extraordinary use of its media access and its’ adept use of social media to drive its agenda while taunting their centrist counterparts as being on the wrong side of history.

They benefit from disproportionate media attention the way Popeye benefits from spinach.

For them, party loyalty is secondary to their commitment to remake government fully and fundamentally into an institution to reach into virtually every aspect of daily life.

The clashes between the two intra-party ideologies will most certainly continue and possibly intensify and, if left unresolved, will sow the seeds of damaging political disruption heading into the 2022 election cycle.

In the four years Pelosi jousted with President Trump she attained a level higher than that reached by most of her predecessors.

She fell victim, though, to an occupational hazard of such a lofty position: She began to believe her own press clippings and became blinded to the reality that the fawning media attention created an illusory environment.

Carl Golden is a senior contributing analyst with the William J. Hughes Center for Public Policy at Stockton University.