Pelosi says she didn’t ask Biden to step down but to provide ‘campaign that would win’

Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) claimed she never told President Joe Biden to drop out of the presidential race but rather told him to give Democrats “a campaign that would win” when pressure mounted for the president to drop out.

Reports swirled in the weeks following Biden’s disastrous June presidential debate that Democratic leaders, including Pelosi, were concerned about the president’s ability to win in November and his effect on downballot Democrats. While on ABC News’s Good Morning America on Monday, Pelosi denied she had called for him to step down and said she only spoke to Biden directly.

“People said I was burning up the airwaves. No, I wasn’t. The only person that I spoke to about this was the president,” Pelosi said. “Other people called me about what their views were about it, but I rarely even returned a call, much less initiated one.”

Pelosi added that she wanted to see how the campaign could win but was struggling to foresee its path.

“I wasn’t asking him to step down. I was asking for a campaign that would win,” Pelosi said. “And I wasn’t seeing that on the horizon.”

She emphasized campaign decisions should be made in favor of “winning” and that the candidate is the “most important decision” in determining whether a campaign can win.

Pelosi, in a clip shared by CBS News that aired this weekend, claimed she was not the leader of any pressure campaign, adding that she “never called anybody.”

While the former House speaker stepped out of Democratic congressional leadership at the end of the last Congress, Pelosi, 84, still remains a key power player in Democratic politics. She is seeking reelection to her San Francisco House seat in November, a seat she has held since 1987.