SENIOR DEMOCRAT NANCY Pelosi has blasted US president Joe Biden for ending his campaign late and endorsing Kamala Harris so quickly after stepping down.

Pelosi, the Democratic former House speaker, has told the New York Times that she that “had the president gotten out sooner, there may have been other candidates in the race” to face Donald Trump.

The immediate aftermath of Harris’s defeat has seen Democrats clash heads over who bears responsibility for the loss.

In her interview, Pelosi revealed that her “anticipation” was that there would be a selection contest to find a candidate to face Donald Trump, only to find that the sitting president had endorsed his second in command.

“The anticipation was that, if the president were to step aside, that there would be an open primary,” she told the newspaper.

Pelosi said she believed Harris would have been “stronger going forward” if the party had held an open primary to decide their candidate.

However, she added: “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 is believed to have played a big role in the convincing Biden not to seek re-election but she told the newspaper that Biden should not have endorsed the vice president right after he stepped aside.

That endorsement helped to solidify her as the party’s candidate against the Republican party, leading to more endorsements in the subsequent days last summer for the election that culminated with her being soundly defeated this week by Trump.