An MSNBC host who once served as an aide to President Joe Biden hit out at Nancy Pelosi for engineering his “very public demise” in the final months of the 2024 election — paving the way for Vice President Kamala Harris to eventually lose the race to Donald Trump.
Symone Sanders-Townsend, who served as a senior adviser to Biden as well as a spokesperson for Harris before joining the Comcast-owned cable outlet in 2022, appeared on MSNBC’s “The Weekend” on Sunday for a panel discussion about the fallout from the election.
When analyzing where Democrats went wrong, Sanders-Townsend cited Pelosi by name, saying that the former House speaker deserves to share some of the blame for Harris’ loss. Her comments were reported by Mediaite.
A fellow MSNBC panelist, Leah Daughtry, the co-chair of the Democratic National Committee’s Rules Committee, noted during the discussion: “With all due respect, a lot of people on Capitol Hill, they don’t have the answers.”
Sanders-Townsend then chimed in: “I’m gonna say it if she ain’t gonna say it — Nancy Pelosi, everybody talks about how the Speaker Emerita, you know, she’s so strategic, she can count, she did all of that when she was the Speaker in Congress, but my question is: where is your calculator now?”
She added that Democrats were “about to lose the daggone House” — suggesting that Pelosi’s move to force Biden from the race led to what happened.
“She played in presidential politics this cycle, and she helped orchestrate the very public demise of the president,” Sanders-Townsend said.
She praised her former boss, Biden, saying: “And thank God for Joe Biden, that he came out and, yes, endorsed his VP. ‘Cause these people wanted an open primary!”
“For what?”
Sanders-Townsend cited a recent podcast interview in which Pelosi criticized Biden for not getting out of the race sooner in order to allow the party to hold an open primary.
“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.”
Pelosi was one of the senior Democrats who helped nudge Biden aside following his disastrous debate performance in late June during which he struggled to form coherent sentences and had trouble with memory and recall.
According to Pelosi, Biden tied his party’s hands by immediately endorsing Harris instead of allowing the party to pick a candidate in a primary process.
“If [Biden’s stepping aside] had been much earlier, it would have been different,” Pelosi said.
“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.”
The Post has sought comment from Pelosi.
