It didn’t take long after President Donald Trump wiped the floor with Kamala Harris on Election Night for Democratic Party insiders to begin turning on each other.
Perhaps the most notable postmortem on the party’s resounding loss came from former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who issued a scathing rebuke of the anti-democratic process that resulted in Harris’ nomination.
According to Breitbart:
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.”
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Pelosi, a, harsh critic during Trump’s first term, has been the subject of social media speculation and criticism in the days since Trump won a second term.
Do you support President Trump prosecuting Nancy Pelosi and the rest of the January 6th Committee?
YES or NO?
If YES, I will follow you back 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/1vZttrQcs3
— Donald J. Trump 🇺🇸 News (@DonaldTNews) November 9, 2024
Just a quick reminder of when Nancy Pelosi ripped up Trump's speech.
Elephants have long memories. pic.twitter.com/uPNj6gDXCf
— Moderate to Severe (@Mod2Severe) November 8, 2024
Heated Discussion: Aren’t you wondering what Nancy Pelosi and Donna Brazile were arguing about at the Kamala Harris defeat speech? pic.twitter.com/aWzWj5pI5V
— John Cremeans USA (@JohnCremeansUSA) November 8, 2024
Nancy Pelosi
2020 2024 pic.twitter.com/RcU4JWxKvU
— Edward Dowd (@DowdEdward) November 8, 2024
Meanwhile, the Harris campaign seems to be focusing all of its blame on Biden and Biden aides are returning fire, per the BBC.
Speaking to political news outlet Politico, Harris aides are laying the blame at Biden’s feet and said he should have bowed out sooner.
“We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president,” said one unnamed aide. “Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.”
However, a former Biden aide told Axios, another political news outlet, that Harris was making excuses.
“How did you spend $1 billion and not win?” said the aide, adding an expletive.
ADVERTISEMENTAn unnamed former Biden aide told Politico this week that former President Barack Obama’s advisers were to blame because they “publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee”.
Here’s some additional coverage of Pelosi’s post-election remarks:
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