Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) slammed President Joe Biden for choosing to run for re-election instead of stepping aside sooner to allow for a primary.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race. The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.” Pelosi told the New York Times in an interview to be released this weekend.
“Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward,” she continued.
“But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened. And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been different,” Pelosi said.
Biden dropped out of the presidential contest in July after 14 million Democrats already voted in the primary.
The president’s decision to not seek re-election came amid pressure from Democrats to drop out of the race after a disastrous debate performance inflamed concerns about his age.
Pelosi reportedly played a key role in getting Biden to eventually step aside.
Pelosi’s comments come as Democrats are pointing fingers after Harris’ devastating loss to Trump in the general election this week. And she isn’t the only Democrat blaming Biden.
Nearly a dozen officials and party operatives told Politico that Biden squandered valuable months only to end in disaster on the debate stage, and with just 107 days to go before the election at the time, it was far too late for Harris to build a winning case for herself.
The White House did not directly respond to questions about criticism that Biden waited too long to drop out.
“He believed he made the right decision,” Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said at daily briefing this week.
Pelosi also pushed back on Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) blaming Harris’ loss on Democrats “abandon[ing] working class people.”
“Bernie Sanders has not won,” Pelosi said. “With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working-class families.”
Instead, Pelosi suggested that Democrats lost working-class voters over culture issues.
“Guns, God and gays, that’s the way they say it,” she said. “Guns, that’s an issue; gays, that’s an issue, and now they’re making the trans issue such an important issue in their priorities; and in certain communities, what they call God, what we call a woman’s right to choose.”
