Pelosi: If Biden exited sooner, 'it would have been different'

Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) suggested Democrats may have won the presidency if President Biden stepped aside sooner, saying “it would have been different.”

“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Pelosi told The New York Times. “The anticipation 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," she added in a discussion with LuLu Garcia-Navarro during a Saturday episode of “The Interview,” a podcast series by the Times.

The Democratic leader said Biden’s endorsement made it harder for the party to evaluate other viable candidates. However, in the past, she supported a second term for Biden.

“And because the president endorsed Kamala Harris immediately, that really made it almost impossible to have a primary at that time,” Pelosi stated. “If it had been much earlier, it would have been different.”

Throughout the segment, Pelosi, who was just reelected, harped on why the party lost this election cycle. She denied the loss's connection to Democrats' inability to grasp the attention of working-class people.

“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.”

Instead, she highlighted three topics that she believes drove voters away from the party.

“Guns, God and gays — that’s the way they say it,” she concluded. “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.”