Hillary Clinton says Biden’s reelection bid was a ‘terrible mistake’

NEW YORK — Hillary Clinton suggested in a new interview that the Democratic Party’s loss in 2024 boiled down to a “terrible miscalculation” — President Joe Biden’s decision to run for reelection.

At an event in Manhattan on Monday, Clinton told The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, that Biden had made a “terrible mistake for himself, his legacy and for the country” in trying to run again at age 81.

If Biden had decided to “pass the torch” and the Democratic Party had held a competitive presidential primary, Clinton told Remnick, “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.”

Clinton’s assessment came at a moment of renewed scrutiny of the mistakes that led to Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Trump in 2024.

Last month, the Democratic National Committee released an incomplete, error-filled autopsy of the election that faulted the Biden White House for how it positioned Harris for the race before Biden’s late exit. (It did not deeply analyze Biden’s initial decision to run for reelection.)

And in late May, Jill Biden, Biden’s wife, told “CBS News Sunday Morning” that she had been “scared” during Biden’s disastrous performance against Trump in the first 2024 presidential debate. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke,’” said Jill Biden, who pushed her husband to stay in the race after the debate.

Joe Biden ultimately left the race in late July 2024, immediately putting his weight behind Harris, his vice president, but leaving her just three months to build her own campaign before Election Day.

Clinton and Biden have long maintained a relationship that is warm in public but intensely competitive and even resentful in private.

They served together in the loftiest posts in President Barack Obama’s administration — Biden as vice president and Clinton as secretary of state — and both contemplated running for president in 2016 before Biden decided not to do so.

Obama assessed Clinton to be a stronger candidate than Biden, who was grieving his son Beau’s death from brain cancer. And Obama gently discouraged his vice president from running that year.

Over the years, Biden has at times expressed remorse that he did not enter the race in 2016. Even before Clinton’s loss, he said of his decision, “I regret it every day.” In 2017, he said, “I think I could have won.” He has also maintained that he could have won in 2024 had he stayed in the race.

Clinton told Remnick that Democrats who had tried to persuade Biden to leave the 2024 race after the debate were met with “total denial.” The president was ultimately swayed, she said, only by “polling information.”

Clinton said Harris had lost in part because of how little time she had to stage a campaign, and in part because it was difficult for the vice president to criticize the unpopular Biden.

“Some people didn’t want to hear anything from any candidate, especially somebody that he picked to be the vice president, criticizing him,” Clinton told Remnick at the event, held at the 92nd Street Y. “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.”

A spokesperson for Biden, TJ Ducklo, declined to comment on Clinton’s remarks.

Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 but lost key swing states to Trump. His upset victory set off months of postmortems and hand-wringing by stunned Democrats struggling to reckon with their defeat to a scandal-plagued reality TV star.

Clinton blamed a number of forces beyond her control for her loss, including Russian interference and the decision by the FBI director at the time, James Comey, to announce at the height of the election that his office was reviewing whether Clinton had mishandled classified information.

But she also said she had made mistakes, including skirting State Department rules prohibiting the use of private email for government business.

“The most important of the mistakes I made,” she said in 2017, “was using personal email.”