Hillary Clinton delivered her sharpest public rebuke of Joe Biden's 2024 reelection campaign during a Monday night appearance at 92NY, telling The New Yorker's David Remnick that Biden's refusal to step aside cost Democrats the presidency and damaged his own legacy.
"He made a terrible mistake for himself, his legacy and for the country," Clinton said during a taping of The New Yorker Radio Hour, as the Daily Mail reported.
The remarks from the Democrats' 2016 nominee, a former Secretary of State, U.S. Senator, and First Lady, amount to a full-throated indictment of the decision-making that led her party into a general election with a candidate most voters already doubted. Clinton didn't hedge. She laid the blame on Biden personally and on the advisers who encouraged him to run.
Clinton told Remnick that Biden had previously signaled he would not seek a second term. She argued that an earlier exit, by late summer 2023, would have given Democrats time to hold a competitive primary and nominate a stronger candidate.
"He had said that he would not run again. And counterfactual narratives are always a bit tricky. But 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, you know, the torch to the next generation, we would have had a real contest."
She went further, claiming that any plausible Democratic nominee, whether Vice President Kamala Harris, a governor, or a senator, would have defeated Donald Trump if given a full primary campaign to build support.
"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."
That assertion is, of course, unprovable. But it reflects a growing consensus inside the Democratic establishment that Biden's stubbornness, not Trump's strength, was the decisive variable in 2024.
The sequence of events tells its own story. Biden ran for president in 2020 as a self-described "bridge" candidate. He was 77 years old at the time. Jill Biden later wrote in her book View from the East Wing that during the 2020 race, Biden "had privately floated the idea of being a one-term, transitional President."
That plan didn't survive contact with Donald Trump's November 2022 announcement that he would again seek the White House. Biden officially launched his 2024 bid in April 2023. By the late months of that year, polling showed a majority of Americans were concerned about Biden's age should he win a second term.
The Democratic primary was effectively cleared for him. Only self-help guru Marianne Williamson and Rep. Dean Phillips mounted challenges, neither a serious threat. The party's leadership closed ranks around an incumbent whose fitness was already a subject of widespread public doubt.
The reckoning arrived in late June, when Biden's debate performance against Trump prompted members of his own party to call on him to drop out. He stayed in the race until late July, then bowed out and endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. She had 107 days to mount a general election campaign. She lost every swing state.
Clinton's critique of that chain of events was blunt. The broader pattern of Democratic Party positioning and political reversals on major issues has only compounded the sense that the party's leadership class operates on its own timeline, disconnected from voters.
Jill Biden's memoir adds a crucial detail that supports Clinton's account. The former First Lady wrote that Biden's senior advisers "insisted he needed to run" when he explored whether to seek reelection.
"During the 2020 race, Joe had privately floated the idea of being a one-term, transitional President, but as he explored the question of a reelection bid, every one of his senior advisors insisted he needed to run."
She acknowledged there had been "buzz" around potential Democratic primary candidates but wrote that "we were told that based on polling, Joe was the Democrats' best bet." She also defended Biden's capacity: "While the age question was there, Joe kept showing that he was still able to do the job."
Yet when asked on Morning Joe whether her husband would have been able to fulfill a second term, Jill Biden offered a far less confident answer: "I don't know. I don't know the answer to that."
That admission alone is remarkable. The former First Lady, the person closest to Biden, could not say with certainty that he could have served four more years. It raises an obvious question: if the people inside the operation weren't sure, why did they press forward?
Clinton called it "a terrible miscalculation on the part of President Biden." She described the bind Democrats found themselves in once Biden refused to step aside on his own terms.
"But once he didn't move, and did not, you know, admit that he had said he was going to step aside and then decided not to, and held on for as long as he did, we were in a terrible dilemma."
The dilemma was real. Democrats spent months publicly defending Biden's fitness while privately worrying about it. When the dam broke after the debate, the party scrambled to rally behind Harris with barely three months before Election Day. The result was a defeat across every contested battleground.
Clinton, of course, has her own complicated history with presidential campaigns and with the political machinery that surrounds them. Her 2016 campaign's role in funding opposition research, including the discredited Steele dossier, remains a sore point for many conservatives. The broader intelligence and surveillance controversies from that era, including ongoing fights over FISA authorities, are still being litigated in Congress and the courts.
But on the narrow question of Biden's reelection decision, Clinton's critique is difficult to dismiss. The facts line up behind her argument. Biden said he'd be a bridge. His wife confirmed he considered serving one term. Polls showed voters were worried. His advisers pushed him to run anyway. He ran. He collapsed in the debate. He dropped out too late. His replacement lost.
Clinton pointed at Biden. Jill Biden pointed at senior advisers. The advisers, unnamed in the former First Lady's book, have not publicly responded. No one in the Democratic establishment has accepted responsibility for a decision that, by Clinton's telling, was the single biggest factor in handing the presidency back to Trump.
The investigations and political fallout from the broader 2016-era conflicts between Democrats and the Trump movement continue to shape the landscape. But the 2024 debacle is a self-inflicted wound of a different kind, not a matter of intelligence agencies or legal maneuvering, but of one man's refusal to keep his word.
Clinton acknowledged the limits of her own argument. "Counterfactual narratives are always a bit tricky," she said. Fair enough. Nobody can prove that an open 2024 primary would have produced a winner. But the actual result, a 107-day scramble that ended in a sweep of the swing states, speaks for itself.
The Democratic Party spent years telling voters that institutions matter, that norms matter, that the stakes are too high for ego. Then its sitting president broke his own promise, ignored the polls, and dared his party to stop him. They didn't, until it was too late.
When even Hillary Clinton is willing to say it out loud, the verdict is in. The only people still pretending Biden's reelection bid made sense are the ones who helped him make the decision.
