Nancy Pelosi Got Joe Biden to Quit. Will She Go All In for Kamala Harris?

Nancy Pelosi got what she wanted. The former Democratic Speaker of the House, longtime California congresswoman, and lifelong cold-blooded tactician was a crucial player in forcing President Joe Biden to drop his reelection bid.

Pelosi began somewhat subtly, with an appearance on MSNBC where she inferred Biden should reconsider his determination to continue as the Democratic nominee. And when that didn’t work, she reportedly made phone calls to Biden. The momentum she stoked—in a mere 11 days—forced the president to quit.

Pelosi certainly wasn’t the only factor. “I’ll tell you why they’re going to come to their senses. It’s not gonna be polling. This campaign is literally going to run out of money,” a Bidenworld insider who talks with big-money donors told me days before Biden dropped out. “Donors feel there were people who knew the president was declining and kept it a secret. That’s why they’re pissed.” At least $90 million was being withheld, and as of June 30, Donald Trump’s campaign had $32 million more cash on hand than Biden’s—and that was before the failed assassination attempt.

The money crunch combined with a steady drip of high-profile Democrats—senators Jon Tester and Sherrod Brown, Congressman Jamie Raskin—coming out in favor of Biden’s withdrawal, plus eroding poll numbers in battleground states made the president’s decision all but inevitable. The timing was still a surprise, though: an abrupt letter posted to social media on Sunday afternoon, followed minutes later by a statement passing the baton to Kamala Harris.

Or trying to pass the baton, anyway. Pelosi has had a tepid, cordial relationship with Harris to this point. The two of them made history together in 2022, when they became the first two women to stand behind a president during a State of the Union speech. Last year, though, Pelosi dodged when CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked—twice—if she thought Harris was Biden’s best choice for a 2024 running mate. And the same day that Pelosi went on TV to drop that large hint to Biden about stepping aside, she told members of California’s congressional delegation that if it happened, she favored an open competition for Biden’s replacement as candidate—not an immediate turn to Harris.

On Sunday, as many politicians and delegations—including Florida, New Hampshire, and North Carolina—declared their support for Harris, Pelosi was conspicuously silent. “Nancy likes to play five-dimensional chess,” says a Democrat who knows Pelosi well. “So part of it could just be, ‘I’m pressuring you to rise to the occasion.’ But that’s not a helpful external message right now.”

But come Monday afternoon, Pelosi offered a full-throated endorsement. “My enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris for President is official, personal and political,” she wrote in a statement touting the vice president’s “strength and courage as a champion for working families, notably fighting for a woman’s right to choose.” She added: “Personally, I have known Kamala Harris for decades as rooted in strong values, faith and a commitment to public service. Politically, make no mistake: Kamala Harris as a woman in politics is brilliantly astute—and I have full confidence that she will lead us to victory in November.”

Pelosi concluded her endorsement by imploring Democrats to “unify and charge forward to resoundingly defeat Donald Trump and enthusiastically elect Kamala Harris as the next President of the United States.”

Indeed. The Democrats, for once, need to be more like the Republicans, or at least the Trump MAGA version of the Republican Party. If the top priority truly is defeating Trump—and this being politics, it isn’t the true goal for people who are looking to maximize their leverage or to preserve their chances for a 2028 presidential run—then the rest of the Democratic Party needs to shut up about an open convention or the appearance of the handoff to Harris being a backroom deal. She is the second-highest elected official in the country, making her the next in line in every respect. She’s earned this shot, after running and losing badly in 2020 and sucking it up, never publicly complaining when some Biden loyalists belittled her skills; and Harris has improved as a politician.

“She has definitely gotten better,” Ashley Etienne told me when I asked about Harris earlier this month. Etienne should know: She worked as the vice president’s communications director during Harris’s rocky first year in office, following two stints working for Pelosi.

“When people talk about Harris, they don’t talk about the nuance. For a large majority of her career, she was a lawyer, which is not transferable to being the vice president,” Etienne says. “But it’s clear she understands the value she adds now in a way that I don’t think we knew in her first year. And so the administration is giving her more space to flex. She’s gotten a little looser, running greater risks. Like when she went down to Florida and went after [Ron] DeSantis. Or going to Minnesota and becoming the first president or vice president to visit an abortion clinic, right? She’s putting herself in the center of the action and it’s paying off. She’s got higher favorables than the president with key constituencies, from Black and brown people to young people and women.”

Does that all add up to Harris having a better chance of winning than Biden did? Maybe. But a better chance than Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer or Josh Shapiro would? No one knows. (Within hours of Biden’s exit, Democrats raised a whopping $50 million—perhaps a sign of enthusiasm for Harris already.)

All those recent polls testing Somebody Else against Trump have been asking about politicians with vastly lower national profiles than Biden’s, politicians who haven’t been subjected to Republicans’ relentless attacks. The only sure thing is that Harris will lose if there isn’t complete, whole-hearted backing for her—from big-money donors, from unions, from her potential rivals for the nomination, from Nancy Pelosi to Barack Obama and everyone else who just got what they wanted with Biden’s exit. Not just issuing a perfunctory endorsement on X—campaigning for and with Harris and raising every dollar possible on her behalf, to fight against what is sure to be a sexist and racist onslaught.

Yes, asking for Democratic unity for the next three months is naive, perhaps even laughable. But the rhetoric about this being a campaign to save democracy is not just words. And besides, backing Harris and beating Trump is the least that all those people owe Joe Biden.