Pelosi: Biden should have dropped out earlier, primary should have been held
Former House speaker denies Democratic Party abandoned working class voters, says Trump won election because of ‘guns, God and gays – that’s the way they say it’
Former US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi blamed US President Joe Biden in an interview published Thursday for US Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to Donald Trump in the presidential election, saying Harris’s chances would have been better had Biden dropped out of the race earlier.
Speaking to The New York Times, Pelosi said that when Biden quit the race in July, it was presumed there would be an open primary for the Democratic nominee. Biden, however, endorsed his deputy within an hour, effectively precluding such a possibility.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi told The Times’ journalist Lulu Garcia-Navarro, the host of the paper’s podcast “The Interview.” “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 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.”
Biden, who initially refused to step aside as nominee despite calls to do so after a disastrous debate against Trump, eventually ceded to a high-pressure campaign led by Pelosi.
In the interview, Pelosi rejected the idea put forward by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that the Democrats’ loss was caused by the party’s abandonment of the American working class.
“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.”
Instead, Pelosi attributed Trump’s victory to cultural issues, saying, “Guns, God and gays — that’s the way they say it. 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.”
Former US president Trump decisively won the election on Tuesday with 301 electoral college votes out of the 270 necessary for victory and 50.5 percent of the popular vote.
