Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has slammed Joe Biden for delaying his exit from the 2024 race and denying his party an open selection process for his replacement
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” the veteran Democrat from California said in an interview with The New York Times. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”
Pelosi was a leading figure in convincing Biden to give up his own campaign in the wake of his disastrous debate performance against Donald Trump.
She gave the critical interview to host Lulu Garcia-Navarro on The Interview podcast, which will be released in full on Saturday.
Democrats are now embroiled in a public postmortem on the failure of the Harris campaign after Trump swept to victory on Tuesday and a second term in the White House.
The Independent has reached out to the White House and Harris campaign for comment.
Biden endorsed Harris within an hour of backing out of the race on July 21, and within two days she announced she had secured enough DNC delegates to secure the party’s nomination.
“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in [a primary] and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened,” Pelosi told the outlet.
“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.”
The Times noted that Pelosi “went to great lengths to defend the Biden administration’s legislative accomplishments, most of which took place during his first two years, when she was the House speaker.”
Biden was “seething” at Pelosi’s pressure on him to step away from the race, according to CNN, and after it happened she admitted she had not spoken to the president.