5 Takeaways From Nancy Pelosi’s Interview With The New York Times

After the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, Nancy Pelosi made it known that she would do everything she could to prevent Donald Trump from becoming president again. Pelosi, who was both minority leader and House speaker during Trump’s first term, was reportedly instrumental in persuading President Biden to end his candidacy over the summer. Like most Democrats, she rallied around Kamala Harris and, as late as the night before the election, projected confidence that Harris would win on Tuesday. That didn’t pan out.

On Thursday, I spoke to Pelosi for the New York Times podcast I co-host, “The Interview.” She dismissed the idea that Trump’s electoral success was a rebuke of her party and insisted that the Democrats were poised for future success.

Here are five takeaways from the conversation with Ms. Pelosi:

Pelosi suggests there should have been an open primary after Biden dropped out.

Pelosi suggested that it would have been better for the Democratic Party if President Biden had decided earlier that he would not run again, allowing time for an open primary. She said that she believed Harris would have done well in a primary, “but we don’t know that.”

She added: “That didn’t happen. We live with what happened.”

Pelosi also noted that Biden had “made a patriotic, selfless decision for which we are all very grateful” and argued that one reason it was still possible for Democrats to win the House was that Biden had dropped out. “So I thank him for that.”

She believes the Democrats are still the party of the working class, no matter what Bernie Sanders says.

There has been much hand-wringing, and also evidence, that the Democrats have become the party of college-educated elites and that working-class voters have shifted to the right. Pelosi disagrees. “We are the kitchen table, working-class party of America,” she said.

As for Bernie Sanders’s accusation that the Democrats have abandoned the working class, Pelosi was not having it. “Bernie Sanders has not won,” she said. “I think the message that Bernie Sanders has put out is not the winning message for the American people. I love him. I think he’s great. He’s been a wonderful, shall we say, champion for his point of view, but his point of view is not correct when he says the Democrats have abandoned working families.”

She thinks Republicans won in part because of cultural issues like “guns, God and gays.”

When asked, if Democrats are still the party of the working class, why voters who earned less than $100,000 had gone for Trump in such large numbers, Pelosi argued that part of the reason was the culture war: “There are cultural issues involved in elections as well. Guns, God and gays — that’s the way they say it. 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.”

She says immigration is a culture war issue, and a messaging issue.

Pelosi was not interested in talking about immigration as a policy problem. “When the candidate for president is saying that these people coming in are murderers, rapists, thieves and all the rest of that — he made that a cultural issue,” she said.

While she was reluctant to criticize Democratic policy during our conversation, she did criticize messaging: “I don’t think we were clear enough by saying fewer people came in under President Biden than came under Donald Trump. It’s clarity of the message.”

2024 wasn’t so bad for the Democrats, she says.

Pelosi was unwilling to concede that the Democrats, who lost the White House and the Senate, had been roundly defeated. She focused instead on the possibility that her party could still control the House. “I don’t see it as an outright rejection of the Democratic Party,” she said. “We lost the presidential election,” but “in many cases, our Democrats in the House ran ahead of the presidential ticket. So, your branding that we all got rejected, we didn’t.”