Nancy Pelosi slams Bernie Sanders for comments about Democrats abandoning working class amid party blame game
Nancy Pelosi has slammed Bernie Sanders for his claims that Democrats have “abandoned working-class families” as the blame game over Kamala Harris’s presidential election loss continues to ramp up.
The newly re-elected Vermont senator said in a statement after Donald Trump sailed to victory that “it should come as no great surprise that a Democratic Party, which has abandoned working-class people, would find that the working-class has abandoned them.”
“While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” he said.
In an interview with The New York Times, the former House speaker, a powerful force in Democratic politics, responded to his comments, saying she “completely disagreed” and does “not respect” his remarks.
“Kamala Harris ran ahead of Bernie Sanders in Vermont,” she said, before reiterating that the purpose of the Democratic party was to go to bat for “America’s working families.”
Asked why the majority of working class voters had flipped to the GOP, she replied: “Go ask Bernie Sanders. Bernie Sanders has not won.”
She continued: “Let me, 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. That’s where we are.
“For example, under President Biden, you see the rescue package, money in the pockets of people, shots in the arm, children in school safely, working people back to work.... What did, what’s his name? What did Trump do when he was president? One bill that gave a tax cut to the richest people in America.”
Pelosi doubled down on her belief that the party does champion the working class and dismissed the theory pushed by Sanders and other progressives that it had ignored the concerns of voters this election cycle.
In the same interview, Pelosi also tore into President Joe Biden, laying part of the blame for Harris’s defeat at his refusal to drop out of the presidential race sooner – despite her having reportedly pushed him to do so – as Democrats continue to point fingers during a public postmortem on the failure of the VP’s campaign.
“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” she said. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”
Pelosi also wondered whether a primary should have been held at which Harris or an alternate candidate could have been chosen to top the ticket. Instead, Biden endorsed Harris within an hour of backing out of the race on July 21, and within two days she announced she had secured enough DNC delegates to secure the party’s nomination.
“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 told the paper.
“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.”
A gamut of reasons have since been offered for the cause of Harris’s crushing defeat on Tuesday.
Some Democrats think swapping Biden for Harris was the mistake. Others agree with Pelosi and have blamed Biden himself, saying he took far too long to drop out.
Progressives, like Sanders, point to the Biden administration’s stance on Israel and the Harris campaign’s attempts to appeal to moderates and anti-Trump Republicans.