SHADE WAR: Pelosi blames Biden for Kamala’s loss—says he should have quit race sooner

Pelosi is widely believed to have been behind the effort to push Biden out of the presidential race after his sad, confusing debate performance against now President-elect Donald Trump in June. Biden did leave the race on July 21, and hours later endorsed Harris for president. It has been reported that Biden and Pelosi have not spoken since then.

Pelosi told The Times that it was her understanding that Biden dropping out would result in something of a mini-primary where other candidates could be vetted and tested before a new nominee was selected by the Democrat Party. Biden had already won 14 million votes in primaries across the US at the time he was ousted from the ticket.

"The anticipation," she said, "was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary. 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."

In September, Pelosi claimed that the Democrats did have an open primary and that Harris had won it. "We had an open primary and she won it because nobody else got in the race because she’s politically astute," Pelosi said at the time.

When Biden won the White House in 2020, it was widely seen as a "bridge" presidency. As an elder statesman, with years of service both to the nation and to the Democrat Party, the idea was that he would serve one term and then step aside and let a candidate from the next generation of leftist leaders have a run at the. When Biden later revealed his intention to seek a second term, he said it was he felt national affairs were too serious to do without his leadership.

After the June 27 debate against Trump, the whisper that he should step aside, or "pass the torch," became a maelstrom. Politicians, mostly behind the scenes, were rumored to be pushing Biden to get out of the way while in public, Hollywood actor George Clooney penned an op ed in The New York Times telling him to step aside. It was widely believed that he did this with approval from Barack Obama.

Pelosi, who is a few years older than Biden and has been serving her district of California in the US House for nearly 40 years—since 1987—touted the Biden-Harris administration's legislative accomplishments even as she bad-mouthed Biden for not willingly giving up power sooner as his first term in the White House came to an end.