(Headline USA) Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., claimed this week that Vice President Kamala Harris won an “open primary” after President Joe Biden supposedly abandoned his reelection bid.
After helping push Biden out of the 2024 race, Pelosi publicly said she favored a competitive, open primary process ahead of the Democratic National Convention.
Asked this week whether she ended up changing her mind after seeing the “excitement” for Harris’s presidential bid, Pelosi insisted the process had been open and fair.
“We had an open primary and [Harris] won it. Nobody else got in the race,” Pelosi told Semafor. “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 only advantage Harris was given was a “running start,” Pelosi insisted.
Conservatives blasted Pelosi for trying to change the story of Harris’s coronation.
“Listening to Nancy Pelosi’s comments about Joe Biden, you could almost forget that she was one of many who lied to us about his condition, right up until the moment it was no longer to her political advantage to do so,” Jenny Beth Martin, president of Tea Party Patriots Citizens Fund, wrote on X. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that she’d now to try to lie about what she calls the ‘open nomination’ process that led to Kamala’s ascension.”
Even California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was rumored to have been considering a primary bid against Biden last year, acknowledged Harris’s trip to the top of the presidential ticket was forced.
“We went through a very open process, a very inclusive process. It was bottom-up, I don’t know if you know that,” he said last month. “That’s what I’ve been told to say,” Newsom added, laughing.
