Ex-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris’s run for president on Monday, one day after President Joe Biden withdrew from the 2024 race.
“Today, it is with immense pride and limitless optimism for our country’s future that I endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for President of the United States,” she said in a statement. “My enthusiastic support for Kamala Harris for President is official, personal and political.”
The endorsement is notable for its political weight — Pelosi, who retired from House Democratic leadership in 2022, remains an influential force in Congress — but also because she was one of the main party leaders pressing Biden to step aside over his disastrous debate performance.
Pelosi never publicly called on Biden to withdraw, but she kept pressure on him to reconsider his decision to stay in the race. During a high-profile interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, she urged him to make a decision on his candidacy because “time is running short.”
Privately, she reportedly warned Biden that he risks handing the House and Senate to the Republicans if he does not drop out.
Pelosi joins other senior Democrats in endorsing Harris’s run for president. Reps. Katherine Clark (D-MA) and Pete Aguilar (D-CA), the second- and third-ranking Democrats in the House, announced their support on Monday, as did Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL), the Senate majority whip.
Meanwhile, Harris is quickly consolidating Biden’s delegates after the president backed her candidacy upon bowing out. The roll-call vote for the Democratic nomination is expected to take place in a couple of weeks.
Harris has faced concerns that she cannot beat former President Donald Trump in the fall. She suffers from low approval ratings and left the 2020 primary for president early after failing to gain momentum.
Pelosi seemed to address those concerns in her statement. “Politically, make no mistake: Kamala Harris as a woman in politics is brilliantly astute — and I have full confidence she will lead us to victory in November,” she said.
Pelosi also nodded to her Bay Area relationship with Harris, highlighting her “strong values” and “commitment to public service.”
Before serving as vice president, Harris rose through the ranks of California politics to become the state’s senator and attorney general.
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Pelosi would have preferred to throw the nomination open to all possible contenders, viewing it as a way to strengthen Harris’s candidacy, California lawmakers recently told the New York Times, but Pelosi instead emphasized the need for unity in her statement endorsing Harris.
“In the Democratic Party, our diversity is our strength and our unity is our power,” she said. “Now, we must unify and charge forward to resoundingly defeat Donald Trump.”
