Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi blames President Joe Biden for staying in the race too long, Fox News reported. The California Democrat believes Election Day would have gone differently if there had been a choice during the primary.
Biden was clearly suffering from dementia during the campaign, but the Democratic Party kept propping him up until they couldn't any longer. Then, Biden's lousy debate performance against former President Donald Trump forced their hand.
The president stepped down from his reelection campaign on July 21, leaving no time to pick a replacement. He endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, which Pelosi thinks was a mistake.
Pelosi said as much to Lulu Garcia-Navarro for the New York Times podcast, "The Interview." During the conversation, she admitted that Biden wrecked his party's chances at keeping the White House.
Pelosi blamed Biden for leaving Democrats with Harris as their nominee. "Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race," Pelosi told Garcia-Navarro.
"The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary. And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in [a primary] and been stronger going forward," Pelosi claimed.
"But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen," Pelosi pointed out.
"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," Pelosi explained of Harris' recent loss to Trump.
"If it had been much earlier, it would have been different," she added. It was obvious that Harris was a terrible candidate because she had been a supremely unpopular vice president, but Democrats were only able to admit that after the election.
In August, Pelosi claimed that after Harris took over as the nominee, it happened that way because nobody else wanted the position. "Many of us who were concerned about the election wanted to have an open process," Pelosi claimed in an interview with the Wall Street Journal at the time.
"It was an open process, anyone could have gotten in. [Harris] had the endorsement of the president, and she, politically astutely, took advantage of it and shut down — not shut down, but won the nomination," Pelosi went on.
"But anybody else could have gotten in," Pelosi added. Once they were stuck with Harris, Democrats tried to remake the vice president into a viable candidate.
They rebranded her as "brat," leaning heavily into the youth demographic with a marketing campaign to make her seem fresh and full of joy. Unfortunately, Harris was still the same awkward, unlikeable, vapid candidate underneath, and voters could see that.
Pelosi is correct that the Democratic Party made a grave mistake in installing Harris as the replacement for Biden. They lost their chance at the White House because they ran roughshod over their voters.
