Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday delivered her sharpest public rebuke yet of former President Biden, saying his decision to seek reelection in 2024 was a “terrible mistake” that cost Democrats the White House.
Speaking at New York’s 92nd Street Y in a conversation with New Yorker editor David Remnick, Mrs. Clinton was asked directly whether Mr. Biden had erred in seeking another term.
“He made a terrible mistake. He made a terrible mistake for himself, his legacy and for the country,” she replied.
Mrs. Clinton went on to say that Mr. Biden had broken faith with a broadly understood 2020 commitment to serve as a generational bridge. In 2020, Mr. Biden had publicly described himself as “a bridge, not as anything else” to the next generation of Democratic leaders — a remark widely interpreted at the time as signaling a single term, though he never made a formal public pledge not to seek re-election.
“He had said that he would not run again,” Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Remnick. “I believe if he had kept to that plan and said in, say, the late summer of ’23 that he wasn’t going to run, that he was going to pass the torch to the next generation, we would have had a real contest. And, very sadly, I believe whoever emerged from that contest, whether it was the vice president or a governor or a senator or anybody else, would have beaten Donald Trump. So, I think it was a terrible miscalculation on the part of President Biden.”
The remarks come amid a broader reckoning within the Democratic Party over how Mr. Biden’s late exit from the race left former Vice President Kamala Harris with only 107 days to build her own campaign before Election Day.
Mrs. Clinton said Democrats who tried to persuade Mr. Biden to stand down after his disastrous June 2024 debate performance were met with “total denial — and not just from him but from the people around him.” In her telling, Mr. Biden was ultimately moved only by polling data — though she offered those characterizations as her own account of private deliberations rather than documented fact.
The former secretary of state also said Ms. Harris faced a structural disadvantage as the sitting vice president that a primary winner from outside the administration would not have: the difficulty of distancing herself from an unpopular incumbent who had chosen her.
“Some people didn’t want to hear anything from any candidate, especially somebody that he picked to be the vice president, criticizing him,” Mrs. Clinton said. “If it had been a governor or somebody else who had emerged from a different process, they could have done a lot more separating themselves from him.”
Mrs. Clinton’s remarks arrive in the wake of a Democratic National Committee election autopsy released last month that party chair Ken Martin himself acknowledged was incomplete and unverifiable. The 192-page report faulted the Biden White House for failing to position or prepare Ms. Harris to govern, but made only sparse mention of Mr. Biden’s decision to seek re-election and did not address it directly.
The scrutiny of the 2024 cycle has intensified following disclosures by former first lady Jill Biden. In a CBS News “Sunday Morning” interview tied to her memoir, “View from the East Wing,” Dr. Biden said she had been frightened watching her husband’s debate performance, fearing he was having a stroke. She nonetheless pushed him to remain in the race in the weeks that followed.
Mrs. Clinton, who lost to Mr. Trump in 2016 after winning the popular vote, said she had been in “disbelief” watching the June 2024 debate and initially thought Mr. Biden may have been ill. After the performance, she said, White House aides “kept trying to explain it, rationalize it, justify it.”
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