Former US House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said Democrats might have fared better in Tuesday’s election if President Joe Biden had exited the race sooner.

Pelosi – one of the most powerful politicians in Washington – told the New York Times that “had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race”.

Her remarks are the latest finger pointing from Democrats after the party lost hold of the White House and potentially both chambers of Congress on Tuesday.

Pelosi is widely reported to have led the Democrats’ push to oust Biden, who ended up leaving the race at the end of July after weeks of pressure following a poor debate performance against Donald Trump.

As Biden ended his campaign, he quickly endorsed Vice-President Kamala Harris to take his place.

Pelosi told the New York Times: “The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary.”

An open primary would have involved a number of Democratic candidates competing to be elected by party members to succeed Biden as their White House nominee.

Pelosi argued that Harris would have done well in such a primary process and it would have made her “stronger going forward”.

“But we don’t know that. That didn’t happen. We live with what happened,” the California congresswoman, who was re-elected to her 20th term in the House on Tuesday, said.

“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.”

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Speaking to political news outlet Politico, Harris aides also laid the blame at Biden’s feet and said he should have bowed out sooner.

“We ran the best campaign we could, considering Joe Biden was president,” said one unnamed aide. “Joe Biden is the singular reason Kamala Harris and Democrats lost tonight.”

However, a former Biden aide told Axios, another political news outlet, that Harris was making excuses.

“How did you spend $1 billion and not win?” said the aide, adding an expletive.

An unnamed former Biden aide told Politico this week that former President Barack Obama’s advisers were to blame because they “publicly encouraged Democratic infighting to push Joe Biden out, didn’t even want Kamala Harris as the nominee”.

Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat, blamed the election loss on those who plotted to oust Biden.

“For those that decided and moved to break Biden, and then you got the election that you wanted, it’s appropriate to own the outcome and fallout,” he told political outlet Semafor in an interview.

Congressman Tom Suozzi, New York Democratic congressman, said the election loss was partly due to the party’s focus on “being politically correct”.

He said the party had struggled to counteract Republican attack lines on “anarchy on college campuses, defund the police, biological boys playing in girls’ sports, and a general attack on traditional values”.

Ritchie Torres, another New York Democratic congressman, posted on X, formerly Twitter, blaming “the far left”.

He said radicals within the party had “managed to alienate historic numbers of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and Jews from the Democratic Party with absurdities like ‘Defund the Police’ or ‘From the River to the Sea’ or ‘Latinx’”.

Independent Senator Bernie Sanders, who ran for president as a Democrat in 2016 and 2020, accused the party in a lengthy statement of abandoning working people.

“While the Democratic leadership defends the status quo, the American people are angry and want change,” he wrote. “And they’re right.”

He argued Democrats probably wouldn’t learn from the election outcome.

But Democratic National Committee Chairman Jaime Harrison responded on X that Sanders’ accusation was “straight up BS”, saying Biden was “the most-pro worker President of my life time”.