In an interview, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, widely reported as one of the key drivers behind an intraparty effort for President Joe Biden to abandon his reelection bid, lamented the fact that the incumbent didn’t exit the race sooner — and suggested that if he did, which would have allowed an open primary to replace him, Democrats may not be staring down the prospect of Donald Trump’s return to power.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi told the New York Times in excerpts of an interview set to be published in full on Saturday. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”
While there’s been no shortage of finger-pointing among Democrats in the days since Trump handily defeated Kamala Harris and Republicans swept back into power in the U.S. Senate, Pelosi — who led House Democrats for two decades and served as speaker twice — is the most high-profile figure in the party to offer a post-mortem for this week’s election.
Pelosi, 84, reportedly favored an open primary to replace Biden even before the incumbent stepped down from the race following weeks of calls from within his own party after his poor debate performance against Trump in June. Biden quickly endorsed Harris, and the rest of the party quickly followed suit, kicking off a roughly 100-day sprint to try and win the White House. Pelosi endorsed Harris about 24 hours after Biden dropped out of the race.
The California Democrat, who was reelected to her 20th term in the House of Representatives on Tuesday, suggested that Harris might have emerged from a primary as the nominee — but the timing made such a contest “almost impossible.”
“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward,” Pelosi told “The Interview” host Lulu Garcia-Navarro. “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.”
That stance is a common one among Democrats. Businessman Andrew Yang, who ran against Biden for the party’s nomination in 2020, told The Associated Press “the biggest onus of this loss is on President Biden.”
“If he had stepped down in January instead of July, we may be in a very different place,” Yang said.
But others, like Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, who were against forcing Biden off the ticket, stand by their skepticism.
“For those that decided and moved to break Biden, and then you got the election that you wanted, it’s appropriate to own the outcome and fallout,” Fetterman told Semafor in an interview. “It’s perfectly understandable if you demand an alternative. It was an undeniably rough debate. The options: Double down on the only person that’s ever beat Trump, or demand an alternative.
“When the outcome didn’t support your thesis and actions, then own it,” he added. "There’s a lot of egos, institutions and reputations that championed the alternative. When you take a reasonable, calculated risk to f*** around, embrace your culpability for what you found out.”
The timing of Biden’s departure from the race — and even the question of if he should’ve run at all — is one of just several topics being bandied about among Democrats as the reason behind Harris’ loss and Trump’s victory, ranging from dissatisfaction over the economy and a schism over the war in Gaza to the party’s messaging and accusations that they’ve “abandoned” working-class Americans.
Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., had harsh criticism Wednesday for the party that he caucuses with, issuing a statement saying, “It should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party which has abandoned working class people would find that the working class has abandoned them.”
“First, it was the white working class, and now it is Latino and Black workers as well. While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change. And they’re right.”
Pelosi evidently thought very little of the Vermont senator’s comments, telling the Times that “Bernie Sanders has not won.”
“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,” she added.
What Pelosi blames for losses in that demographic? Culture issues.
“Guns, God and gays — that’s the way they say it,” Pelosi 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.”