During an interview with the New York Times, Former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi blamed VP Kamala Harris election loss on President Joe Biden’s late exit from the race and the lack of a Democratic open primary.
Pelosi said that, “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.”
She then added, “And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in that and been stronger going forward. 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.”
For the record, it is equally important to point out that it was Pelosi who put pressure on Biden to drop out of the presidential race after his disastrous performance during the debate with Donald Trump.
However, things were quite different back in November 2022, when ABC’s This Week co-host George Stephanopoulos asked Pelosi, “Do you think President Biden should run again?” she replied, “Yes, I do. President Biden has been a great president for our country. He has accomplished so much.”
The Times reported that Pelosi also disagreed with Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who, after Harris’s loss, remarked, “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.”
“Bernie Sanders has not won,” she responded. “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.”
The paper reported that Pelosi suggested cultural issues were a bigger factor in the Democrats’ losses among working-class voters.
“Guns, God and gays — that’s the way they say it,” she stated. “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.”
