Representative Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) suggested Vice President Kamala Harris lost the general election this week due to President Joe Biden’s late exit from the presidential race and bemoaned the lack of an open primary.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” the former House speaker said in a post-election interview with the New York Times‘ Lulu Garcia-Navarro on Thursday. “Kamala, I think, still would have won, but she may have been stronger, having taken her case to the public sooner.”
Pelosi was among the Democratic officials pushing the 81-year-old president to step aside after his disastrous debate performance this summer. In July, Biden dropped his reelection bid and endorsed Harris as his successor soon after. Pelosi said Biden’s decision to pass the baton to Harris prevented Democrats from holding an open-primary process to field other candidates.
“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” Pelosi continued.
“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.”
The Times interview was published on Saturday after Pelosi’s comments about Biden and Harris were teased in an article on Friday.
Pelosi seemingly contradicted herself when she said there was no open primary. In September, she claimed there was an open primary and that Harris had surpassed all other Democratic challengers.
“We had an open primary, and she won it because nobody else got in the race, because she’s politically astute,” Pelosi told Semafor at the time.
The California Democrat and the president reportedly have not spoken since the latter dropped out of the race under pressure from the Democratic Party, she told the Guardian in October. Pelosi added that some Biden aides may not have forgiven her for pressuring him to step aside.
Biden’s relationship with the vice president was also tense in the final stretch before Election Day. Biden reportedly did not attend Harris’s watch party on Tuesday night, and as results continued coming in Wednesday morning, Biden was blamed by his own party for Harris’s defeat to president-elect Donald Trump.
Anonymous sources within the Democratic Party castigated Biden for concealing his health and said he should have dropped out sooner, according to news outlets.
Biden privately thought he was the only Democratic candidate who could beat Trump and maintained he was fit to be president for a second term, despite his declining mental health and elderly age. After dropping out of the race and handing the reins to Harris, Biden said at the time that it was “in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down.”
Trump currently stands at 301 electoral votes compared to Harris’s 226. As of Saturday, the former president clinched the race in six key swing states — Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Georgia, and North Carolina — and is on track to win the seventh battleground state, Arizona.
Republicans also retook the Senate majority and are narrowly leading Democrats in the House. The outstanding House races are still too close to call.