Before Nancy Pelosi formally announced her 2027 retirement, one former aide reacted to rumours of the exit. “We will not fully appreciate the time we have spent with her,” the person told NBC News. Timed amid the longest government shutdown in history, and with her successor in the lower chamber struggling, Pelosi’s announcement reinforces one fact: she remains indispensable to the Democrats.

Pelosi is 85 years old. She was four when American troops landed in Normandy. Her early life involved a front-row seat to the power politics of the Forties and Fifties in Baltimore, where her father was a Democratic congressman and eventually mayor. Her political acumen was forged as a volunteer, running in elite fundraising circles with the womanly wiles of a second-wave feminist who could be charming and sharp-elbowed, according to Molly Ball’s 2020 biography.

Having entered Congress in 1988, Pelosi became the first female speaker of the House in 2007, just as the wave of hope and change was about to crash over America. She never endorsed either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in that race, cleverly straddling the old Democratic Party and the new one. One of her major successes was muscling the Affordable Care Act across the finish line in 2009.

By the time Trump stunned Washington and took the White House, Pelosi — part San Franciscan, part Baltimore Catholic — had developed a knack for bridging the Left and the centre. This helped her contain Democrats’ simmering populist anger after Bernie Sanders nearly overtook Hillary Clinton in 2016, and by 2018 her ally Joe Crowley suffered a stunning primary defeat to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Pelosi and AOC never got along, but after the older woman stepped down, the younger realised just how many ways the former speaker had been blocking her. After Pelosi passed the baton to Hakeem Jeffries in 2022, AOC told Ryan Grim: “I thought a lot of my misery was due to leadership more broadly having a thing against me. But […] my life has completely transformed. It’s crazy. And it’s that that made me realise it was kind of just [Pelosi] the whole time.”

That she only fully understood this after the fact is a testament to Pelosi’s cunning. During Trump’s first term — and two impeachments later — she helped Democrats reclaim the House in 2018 and defend it in 2020.

But it was her reputation as a fundraising powerhouse which was mythical in Washington. Susan Page, Washington bureau chief at USA Today and a Pelosi biographer herself, put it this way today: “Pelosi’s prowess at fundraising, her precision in counting votes and her formidable political memory made her not only a groundbreaking female legislator but one of the most consequential congressional leaders in the nation’s history, in the company of Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson.”

A Republican source who went toe-to-toe with Pelosi as a senior staffer agrees. She was “one of the most powerful speakers since Joe Cannon,” with a “preternatural ability to whip her conference,” the person said. “But what made her so effective is that she never took her eyes off the goal: the total remaking of the country.” Additionally, “she muscled Obamacare through and knew it would cost Dems politically. And it did. They lost the House. But she was clear-eyed that the short-term cost was worth the long-term gain — Republicans would never be able to undo it, and they would have permanently restructured the economy. And she was right.” In sum, she was “just pure mission focus and ruthless execution”.

Jeffries is struggling mightily to fill these shoes. As the government shutdown marches on, his caucus has no clear sense of direction. His canned one-liners are widely mocked. As AOC herself noticed, this power vacuum is being filled by populists — something Pelosi would never allow, for reasons she would claim to be practical but which critics would call ideological.

This is the mystery and the genius of Nancy Pelosi. It recalls a question the former speaker reportedly levelled at Rahm Emanuel during the Obamacare battle: “Does the President not understand the way this game works? He wants to get it done and be beloved, and you can’t have both — which does he want?”

It was never unclear where Pelosi landed on that question. In time, though, Democrats may actually grant her both: getting it done and being revered.