How Nancy Pelosi Persuaded Biden to Leave the Race

Joe Biden’s decision to drop out of the presidential race and endorse his vice president, Kamala Harris, to replace him is, from one angle, the final political act of an octogenarian who realizes that his power is coming to an end and who is sagely passing the torch to a younger politician in a last-ditch effort to save his party and his country from authoritarian defeat. But from another vantage point, the real story is one of a different octogenarian—one who has wielded power more effectively than just about any politician in the past half-century—who used her decades of accrued experience and authority to do what no one else apparently could: get a dug-in presidential candidate to drop out and give his party a fighting chance.

Both stories are real. But one seems much closer to the behind-the-scenes reality of Biden’s decision. The truth is: California Rep. Nancy Pelosi likes to win. And more than nearly any other Democrat in my lifetime, she knows how to. If Democrats do pull off a victory in November, it will be in large part because of her unsparing refusal to give into what felt like inevitable defeat.

Biden absolutely deserves praise and thanks for his decision to pull out of the 2024 race. Ceding power (even the potential for power) is never easy, and by all accounts he has been deeply resistant to dropping out. Now that he has, the Democratic Party is in largely uncharted waters. Biden has thrown his support behind Harris, and many other leading Democrats seem to be doing the same. Even if Harris swiftly seals up the nomination, there’s little modern precedent for a new candidate taking over the reins of a presidential campaign from a standstill with only a few months to go.

What is clear is that the candidate is not going to be Biden. And that’s at least in part because Pelosi looked at the polls, saw no path to victory, and understood that the best way to get through to Biden was to confront the president in private, while remaining respectfully assertive in public. And it seems to have worked.

On a call with Biden, Pelosi laid out all the ways in which the numbers didn’t cut in his favor, and the president reportedly told Pelosi that he was seeing polling data suggesting he could still win. “Put Donilon on the phone,” Pelosi is said to have told the president, asking for Biden adviser Mike Donilon. “Show me what polls.”

According to what a Pelosi ally told Politico, she did not want to publicly demand Biden resign but in private was willing to “do everything in her power to make sure it happens”—including telling the president what so many of his advisers, family members, and trusted confidants apparently would not.

Politico once aptly described Pelosi as “an iron fist in a Gucci glove,” and rarely has her handiwork been so apparent. While she remained outwardly supportive of the president, she also simply ignored his repeated statements that he wasn’t dropping out of the race, keeping the door open and the pressure on for him to drop out. “I mean, if the Lord Almighty came down and said, ‘Joe, get out of the race,’ I’d get out of the race,” Biden told ABC’s George Stephanopoulos in early July. “The Lord Almighty’s not coming down.” But Pelosi did. Just a few days later, she went on MSNBC and, in a move familiar to any child of a parent skilled in a raised-eyebrow “It’s up to you” (translation: Don’t you dare), said, “It’s up to the president to decide if he’s going to run”—technically endorsing the idea that the decision was Biden’s alone, while also undermining any suggestion that it had really been made.

“Nancy made clear that they could do this the easy way or the hard way,” one Democrat anonymously told Politico. “She gave them three weeks of the easy way. It was about to be the hard way.”

Pelosi herself made the decision to step back from the height of her power in 2022. She had become the House minority whip in 2002, the first woman to serve in the role. The next year, she became the House’s first female minority leader. And in 2007, she became the first female speaker of the House. Two years ago, in her early 80s and in the midst of growing concerns about American politics turning into a gerontocracy, Pelosi announced that she was ceding her leadership position and threw her weight behind her protégé Hakeem Jeffries, who wound up running unopposed for minority leader. Pelosi has also remained in office, is running for reelection this year, and continues to wield significant influence behind the scenes.

Getting Biden to step aside, and opening up at least the possibility of Democratic triumph in November, is only the latest in a long list of her power moves. She got a divided caucus to pass the long-shot Affordable Care Act and, a decade later, Biden’s American Rescue Plan, along with countless other measures along the way. Although her early tensions with the left-leaning insurgents of the Squad made headlines, the longer-term truth is that Pelosi not only came out on top in those disputes but also repeatedly stood up for and helped to mentor some of these same young, idealistic legislators, making them more effective and more loyal to her.

Pelosi, who is not done yet, seems nearly guaranteed to join LBJ, Ted Kennedy, and an otherwise exclusively-male list of master statesmen (now: statespeople?), dealmakers, and legendary political tacticians. And she does it not by force or intimidation, but with ruthless math and a keen sense of what motivates those around her. As Pelosi biographer Molly Ball put it, not only is she better at counting votes than just about anyone, but “she just has an incredible understanding of human nature, she just knows each one of her 220-odd members, knows what makes them tick.”

She also knows what so many successful women have had to learn the hard way: You can be beloved or you can get stuff done.

Pelosi was wise enough to not just look at the polls and conclude that the math wouldn’t work out for Biden but to look at Biden and ask what it would take to get him to budge. She stood by him publicly, understanding that openly opposing him might mean losing his ear. She showed him the data and, along with some of her closest allies, pressed him to consider his legacy, his realistic chances, and the growing opposition within his own party.

The strategy worked. The president was given a path to step down with his dignity intact. The American public was given a real opportunity to avoid a second Trump presidency and all the democratic backsliding it could bring. And Nancy Pelosi got the one thing she always wants: a way to win. When she announced her endorsement of Harris, the day after Biden left the race, she framed her “enthusiastic support” as “official, personal and political.”