US President Joe Biden has been blamed for the Democrats’ comprehensive defeat in the US elections earlier this week.
Donald Trump, now the President-elect, won the popular vote and seized control of both the Senate and likely the House as the Democrats haemorrhaged votes that they had won four years ago.
Vice-President Kamala Harris stepped in to run against Mr Trump after President Biden withdrew from the race in the summer.
He lost the support of his party as concerns about his age grew, culminating in a disastrous debate performance in June.
Now, former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Nancy Pelosi, has seemingly blamed Mr Biden for the Democrats’ defeat, saying he should have stepped down earlier.
Ms Pelosi, one of the most influential politicians in the US, told Lulu Garcia-Navarro, a host of ‘The Interview,’ that “had the president [Biden] gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,”
She continued: “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.
“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,”
Reports from June indicate that Ms Pelosi was working to convince Mr Biden to step down.
However, he did not make the decision until the month following his awful debate showing against Mr Trump.
