Following Trump’s decisive victory in the 2024 presidential election, Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) provided her diagnosis of what went wrong for the Democratic Party. The former House Speaker suggested that if the Democrats had hosted an actual primary, instead of pushing Harris to the forefront of the ticket, “things would have been different.”
Notably, Pelosi’s statement appears to contradict previous remarks she made about Harris’ appointment as the Democratic nominee, where she indicated that the party had held an “open primary” after President Biden withdrew from the presidential race in July. Pelosi claimed last month that she hasn’t spoken with the president since he dropped out of the race.
Pelosi also stated, “Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race.” She added, “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.” Pelosi further claimed that because Biden, endorsed Harris almost immediately after pulling out of the race, it was “impossible” to look at other candidates.
“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. 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 said.
Despite her comments in August that Harris’ selection was an “open process” and that “anyone could have gotten it,” Pelosi appears to now have flip-flopped on the issue. “[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,” she said.
Pelosi said during a September interview, “No, I didn’t change my mind. We had an open primary; she [Harris] won it. Nobody else got in the race.” She added, “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.”
The American Tribune reported on a controversial anti-Trump tirade that Pelosi delivered in the final days leading up to the election, in which she suggested that Trump’s brain was “deteriorating.” Critics have pointed out that some Democrats have now attempted to fixate on Trump’s age and cognitive ability ever since Biden dropped out of the race, after years of defending his apparent decline in mental faculty.
Before the election, Pelosi suggested that Trump voters “have to know that he can’t last as president for four years with his brain deteriorating at the rate that it is … and they may be voting for President Vance, which would be a horrible thing for our country.”
Watch Pelosi’s comments toward Trump below:
"*" indicates required fields