Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said election season “would have been different” if the Democrat Party had held a real primary process after President Joe Biden abandoned his reelection bid and immediately endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris, backtracking on her previous statements that they had actually held an “open primary.”
The former U.S. House speaker, who said in mid-October that she had not spoken to Biden since she pushed him to drop out of the race in July, said on the New York Times‘ November 9 episode of The Interview podcast, “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race.”
“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” Pelosi told host Lulu Garcia-Navarro.
Biden endorsed Harris to take his place on the top of the ticket mere hours after announcing his departure from the race on July 21, following his self-admitted poor debate performance against now President-elect Donald Trump.
Less than 36 hours after she secured the president’s endorsement, Harris announced that she had locked up the Democrat nomination, Fox News reported.
“And as I say, Kamala may have, I think she would have done well in [a primary] and been stronger going forward. But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened,” Pelosi continued. “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 has flip-flopped on the issue, telling the Wall Street Journal in August that “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. But anybody else could have gotten in,” the California congresswoman added.
She reiterated that sentiment in September, telling Semafor’s Kadia Goba that it was a “blessing” that Harris “took off with it”:
“No, I didn’t change my mind. We had an open primary; she [Harris] won it. Nobody else got in the race,” Pelosi said. “Yes, people could have jumped in — there were some people who were sort of preparing, but she just took off with it, and actually it was a blessing because there was not that much time between then and the election and it sort of saved time.”
