Former Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) criticized President Joe Biden’s late departure from the race in a new interview with The New York Times.

Pelosi, 84, told The Times for “The Interview” podcast that Biden exited the race too late and that she expected there to be an “open primary.” Biden dropped out of the race July 21 and immediately endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris to be his replacement after a disastrous debate performance sparked concerns within his own party.

Now that Harris has lost the race, Democrats are scrambling to figure out who is to blame for Donald Trump’s win. Many have suggested that Biden should have left the race much earlier instead of just about three months before the election. At the time, it was widely reported that Pelosi encouraged Biden to withdraw from the race.

“Had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race,” she told Lulu Garcia-Navarro, host of “The Interview,” according to The Times. “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”

She also suggested that Harris may have performed stronger if there was a primary. While there was some talk of having a quick primary after Biden withdrew from the race, the idea never gained traction.

“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,” Pelosi said.

Other Democrats have criticized Biden for not leaving the race earlier, according to reports from Politico and The Associated Press. David Plouffe, a former senior Barack Obama staffer, made a jab toward Biden on social media platform X this week before deleting his account.

As Democrats try to sort out what went wrong for the vice president, Pelosi pushed back on the argument that the party did not try to appeal more with working class voters. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who caucuses with the Democrats, ripped the Democratic Party after Election Day for not addressing the needs of the working class, saying it was a “disastrous” campaign.

“Bernie Sanders has not won,” Pelosi said, according to The Times. “With all due respect, and I have a great deal of respect for him, for what he stands for, but I don’t respect him saying that the Democratic Party has abandoned the working-class families.”

The newspaper reported that the rest of the interview will be published on Saturday.

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