Former U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Democrats might have done better in Tuesday’s election if President Joe Biden had dropped out of the race earlier.
Pelosi, one of the most powerful politicians in Washington, told the New York Times that “if the president stepped down early, there might be other candidates in the race.”
Her comments were the latest rebuke after Democrats lost control of the White House and both chambers of Congress on Tuesday.
Pelosi has been widely reported to have led the Democratic push to unseat Biden, who eventually dropped out of the race in late July after weeks of pressure following a poor performance in debates with Donald Trump.
After Biden ended his campaign, he quickly endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to succeed him.
“Our expectation is that if the president steps down, there will be an open primary,” Pelosi told the New York Times.
The open primary will involve a number of Democratic candidates vying to be elected by members of their party to succeed Biden as the White House nominee.
Pelosi believes Harris will do well in such a primary process, which will make her “even stronger going forward.”
“But we didn’t know that. That didn’t happen. We accept what happened,” said the California congresswoman, who was re-elected to a 20th term in the House on Tuesday.
“And because the president immediately endorsed Kamala Harris, it really made it almost impossible to hold a primary at that time. If it had been much earlier, it would have been a different story.”
In an interview with Politico, a Harris aide also placed blame on Biden and said he should have withdrawn earlier.
“We campaigned as hard as we could given that Joe Biden is president,” said an aide who spoke on condition of anonymity. “Joe Biden is the only thing Kamala Harris and the Democrats lost tonight. reason.”
However, a former Biden aide told Axios, another political news outlet, that Harris was making excuses.
“How come you spent $1 billion but didn’t win the prize?” the assistant said, then cursed.
An unnamed former Biden aide told POLITICO this week that former President Barack Obama’s advisers are to blame because they “openly encouraged Democratic infighting to oust Joe Biden from office without even wanting to Kamala Harris becomes the nominee.”
Pennsylvania Sen. John Fetterman, a Democrat, blamed the election defeat on those conspiring to overthrow Biden.
“It is appropriate for those who decide and take actions to break Biden and then get the election you want, to bear the consequences and consequences,” he said in an interview with political media Semafor.
New York Democratic Rep. Tom Sozzi said part of the reason for the election defeat was the party’s focus on “political correctness.”
He said the party has been trying to counter Republican attacks on “anarchy on college campuses, defunding the police, biological boys participating in women’s sports and a general attack on traditional values.”
Another New York Democratic congressman, Ritchie Torres, posted on X (formerly Twitter) blaming the “far left.”
He said party activists “have succeeded in alienating record numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians and Jews in the Democratic Party with ridiculous rhetoric like ‘defund the police,’ ‘river to sea,’ or ‘Latino.'” “.
In a lengthy statement, independent Sen. Bernie Sanders, who ran for president as a Democrat in 2016 and 2020, accused the party of abandoning working people.
“While Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” he wrote. “They are right.”
He thinks Democrats may not learn from the election results.
But Democratic National Committee Chairman Jamie Harrison responded on
