Nancy Pelosi laments Biden’s late exit and the lack of an ‘open primary’

WASHINGTON — Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, suggested this week that it would have been better for the Democratic Party if President Joe Biden had abandoned his reelection campaign sooner and the party had then held a competitive primary process to replace him.

In an interview Thursday with the New York Times, Pelosi said what was widely reported around the time Biden dropped out: that she believed it was implicitly understood that his exit would be followed by an internal party competition for a new nominee, instead of an anointment of Vice President Kamala Harris.

“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi said during an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of “The Interview,” a Times podcast. She added during the interview, “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”

Pelosi went on: “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 endorsed Harris within an hour after he ended his campaign in July, a decision he made only after an intense pressure campaign from Democrats that Pelosi quietly led. His support for the vice president, along with backing from many other Democrats, choked off any avenue for a challenger to emerge. Over two weeks, Harris swiftly gathered support from delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

While some Democrats floated the idea of a quick primary, those proposals never gained traction and were not embraced by the Democratic National Committee or convention delegates.

In the interview, 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. After Republicans won control of the House in the 2022 midterm elections, she relinquished her leadership post but remained in the chamber as an eminence grise for the party.

The former speaker, who was elected Tuesday to her 20th term representing San Francisco, argued in the interview that the Democratic Party still stood up for working-class voters on economic issues.

She took issue with comments this week from Sen. Bernie Sanders, the independent progressive from Vermont, who suggested that Harris’ defeat had come in part because Democrats were too focused on identity politics at the expense of economic concerns.

“Bernie Sanders has not won,” Pelosi said. “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.”

She suggested that cultural issues were more to blame for Democrats’ losses among the working class.

“Guns, God and gays — that’s the way they say it,” she said. “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.”