Former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told President Joe Biden that polls show he will lose his electoral rematch against Donald Trump in November and that he might sink the Democrats’ ability to win the House if he stays in the race, according to a report.
The brutally frank exchange led to Biden getting defensive about the polls, sources told CNN, with one source claiming that Biden told Pelosi he’d seen polling showing that he does have a path to victory. News of the private conversation comes on the heels of reports that both Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries have separately urged Biden to drop out, while Pelosi ally Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) on Wednesday became the most high-profile Democrat lawmaker to publicly call on Biden to abandon his re-election campaign.
It’s unclear precisely when Pelosi’s conversation with Biden took place, though one source told CNN it was in the last week. None of the people familiar with the exchange who spoke to the network said whether Pelosi told Biden during their conversation that he should drop out.
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A separate Politico report on the conversation claimed Pelosi told Biden “she and other Democratic lawmakers worry that he’s dragging down the party” and warned that some lawmakers in the party would “grow louder in their griping about his political weaknesses.” She also urged him to make a decision soon about stepping down, according to the outlet.
“The speaker does not want to call on him to resign, but she will do everything in her power to make sure it happens,” one unnamed Pelosi ally told Politico, referring to getting Biden to drop out.
Shortly after Biden’s catastrophic performance in his debate against Trump last month, Pelosi initially defended the 81-year-old Democrat’s “great presidency” even while acknowledging he’d had “a bad night.” As the crisis of confidence in Biden’s ability to win a second term deepened, Pelosi later said she thought it was a “legitimate question” to ask about his mental fitness.
“It’s up to the president to decide if he is going to run,” she told MSNBC last week. “We’re all encouraging him to make that decision, because time is running short.”
Pelosi’s office told both Politico and CNN that the former speaker hadn’t spoken to Biden since she returned to California on Friday. Her spokesperson also questioned Politico’s reporting on the substance of the conversation with Biden, saying the outlet’s “sources are not good sources.”
White House spokesperson Andrew Bates also simply told both outlets that Biden “is the nominee of the party” who “plans to win and looks forward to working with congressional Democrats to pass his 100 days agenda to help working families.”
