Former US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi said that US President Joe Biden's delayed exit from the 2024 US presidential election race cost the Democrats "dearly."
The proclamation from Pelosi came days after the party's presidential nominee, US Vice President Kamala Harris, lost the November 5 polls to the new President-elect Donald Trump.
"We live with what happened," Pelosi told The New York Times as she pondered upon exactly what went wrong. "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, there would be an open primary," Pelosi said in the podcast called The Interview.
"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," she added.
The cracks within the Democrats widenDemocrats have been engaged in bitter blame games soon after Harris lost the polls to Trump. Meanwhile, 84-year-old Pelosi was re-elected this week to a 20th two-year term. Biden has long rejected the argument that he is not fit to run for re-election. However, after a disastrous performance in the debate against Trump, he announced he wouldn't be running for re-election, endorsing Harris.
Pelosi, at that time, played a key role in convincing Biden to step out of the race. In August, the veteran politician said that she had "never been that impressed with his (Biden's) political operation." "They won the White House. Bravo. But my concern was: this ain't happening, and we have to make a decision for this to happen. The president has to make the decision for that to happen," she said.
In the recent NYT podcast, Pelosi also slammed Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders who argued that Democrats lost because they "abandoned the working class". "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 added.
When asked what led to Trump's historic victory, the veteran politician said that it was the cultural issues that helped the Republican firebrand to win the November polls. "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," the Democratic lawmaker said regarding abortion and other reproductive care.
