California Gov. Gavin Newsom joked about the process by which Vice President Kamala Harris secured the Democratic presidential nomination, saying in an interview posted Friday that he was “told to say” it was an open and inclusive process.
Harris replaced Biden at the top of the list of candidates after President Biden’s shock announcement last month that he would not seek reelection to a second term in the White House. Harris has surged in polls and fundraising since then but has never received a single vote as Democrats quickly placed her at the top of their list of candidates.
Democratic critics have said Harris won the nomination without the true will of the voters, but Newsom appears to find the process comical.
“We went through a very open process, a very inclusive process. It was bottom-up. I don’t know if you’re aware of that. That’s what I was told to say,” Newsom said with a chuckle during a conversation with “Pod Save America.” Friday Post.
Newsom later joked that between Biden’s July 21 announcement that he was dropping out of the race and his subsequent tweet endorsing Harris, Democrats held a 30-minute convention.
“That would be great,” Newsom, widely seen as a future White House candidate, joked.
Democrats like Nancy Pelosi have argued that the nomination was not rigged in Harris’s favor after Biden withdrew.
The video began circulating on social media on Friday and drew criticism.
“Democrats are laughing at how anti-democratic, unvoted and secret the process was for selecting a new Democratic presidential nominee and imposing it on the country,” journalist Glenn Greenwald responded.
Another critic added: “Gavin Newsom knows Harris’ nomination is a top-down coup, but they all view it with cynicism. Is this the ‘democracy’ they want to protect? What a terrible joke on their own supporters and this country.”
“The party that’s constantly shouting about DEI and white privilege loves to use DEI to flaunt their own white privilege. Isn’t it crazy to fool voters?” wrote Dumisani Washington, CEO of the Israeli Black Solidarity Institute.
Harris formally accepted the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday night.
Biden won his party’s nomination in March against little opposition, but after his disastrous defeat in the June debates, everything changed: allies in the media and Democrats who had defended his intellectual clarity and fitness for the job changed their tune and called for him to drop out of the race. After initially arguing that only God could remove Biden from office, he eventually bowed to pressure and withdrew.
