Hillary Clinton: Biden reelection campaign a ‘terrible mistake’

Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on Monday criticized former President Biden’s decision to go for another White House term in 2024.

“He made a terrible mistake. He made a terrible mistake for himself, his legacy, and for the country. He had said that he would not run again, and you know, 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,” Clinton told The New Yorker’s David Remnick in a conversation.

“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,” she added.

Clinton is the latest to weigh in on whether Biden should’ve run for reelection.

In her memoir release last fall, former Vice President Kamala Harris called the decision an act of “recklessness.”

“Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness,” she wrote. “The stakes were simply too high. This wasn’t a choice that should have been left to an individual’s ego, an individual’s ambition. It should have been more than a personal decision.”

During Biden’s presidency, questions swirled about his age and health. Those questions were intensified following his rough debate performance against President Trump in June 2024, as his voice sounded hoarse and he stumbled over his words.

After the debate, pressure on Biden to exit the race mounted. Weeks later, he withdrew from the race and Harris took over as the Democratic presidential candidate. Harris ultimately lost to Trump in November, and Democrats lost footholds in Congress.

Clinton herself lost a White House bid to Trump in 2016, leading to the president’s first term in the White House. He was ousted from the presidency after Biden’s win against him in 2020, but returned to the role following Harris’s loss.