In her first interview since Vice President Kamala Harris lost to Republican President-elect Donald Trump, Representative Nancy Pelosi (Democrat, California) rejected any analysis that blames the Democratic Party for turning away from the working class and shared her unvarnished thoughts.
While she disagreed that her party ran a bad campaign, the former House Speaker also suggested Harris would’ve established herself more thoroughly in an open primary that could have happened if President Joe Biden had dropped out sooner.
“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” Pelosi told the New York Times in an interview on Saturday, adding that Harris “would have done well in that and been stronger going forward.”
“But we don’t know that,” she continued. “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.”
Pelosi urged Biden in 2022 to run for reelection. But amid burgeoning concerns about his cognitive abilities earlier this year, she said in July that “it’s up to the president” whether he does. Biden dropped out mere days later, giving Harris around 100 days to campaign.
“The fact is she did a great job with the time constraint that she had,” Pelosi told the Times.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” she continued. “Kamala, I think, still would have won, but she may have been stronger, having taken her case to the public sooner.”
When asked if she wished she would’ve urged Biden to drop out sooner, however, Pelosi simply said, “No.” She added she’d had “no reason to earlier say anything to the president” about concerns regarding his age.
The Times noted she “seemed unwilling or unable” to accept the notion that Trump’s victory was a rebuke of Harris’ party as a whole, which ultimately ran a traditional campaign focusing on interviews with legacy media outlets and a message of “joy.”
Trump ran a racist campaign centred on “bloodthirsty” migrants “bringing bad genes” into the country. But as Senator Bernie Sanders (Independent,Vermont) noted, Trump at least feigned concern about pocketbook issues like inflation — while Democrats, he said, have “abandoned working-class people.”
Pelosi staunchly disagreed that the election, in which Trump is likely to clench the popular vote in addition to the Electoral College, was “an outright rejection of the Democratic Party,” and said she has “a discomfort level” with people arguing it left working-class voters behind.
“No, we didn’t,” Pelosi told the Times. “That’s who we are.”
When pressed on why voters didn’t see Democrats as what Pelosi called the “kitchen-table, working-class party of America,” she said to “go ask Bernie Sanders.”
“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,” Pelosi added. “That’s where we are.”
The finger-pointing among frustrated Democrats continues.
CORRECTION: The headline of this report has been updated to correct a quote.