Representative Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, suggested this week that it would have been better for the Democratic Party if President Biden had abandoned his re-election campaign sooner and the party had then held a competitive primary process to replace him.
In an interview on Thursday with The New York Times, Ms. Pelosi said what was widely reported around the time Mr. Biden dropped out: that she believed it was implicitly understood that his exit would be followed by an internal party competition for a new nominee, instead of an anointment of Vice President Kamala Harris.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” Ms. Pelosi said during an interview with Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of “The Interview,” a Times podcast. She added during the interview, which will be published in full on Saturday, “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”
Ms. Pelosi went on: “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.”
Mr. Biden endorsed Ms. Harris within an hour after he ended his campaign in July, a decision he made only after an intense pressure campaign from Democrats that Ms. Pelosi quietly led. His support for the vice president, along with backing from many other Democrats, choked off any avenue for a challenger to emerge. Over two weeks, Ms. Harris swiftly gathered support from delegates to the Democratic National Convention.
While some Democrats floated the idea of a quick primary, those proposals never gained traction and were not embraced by the Democratic National Committee or convention delegates.
