Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton publicly blamed former President Joe Biden on Monday for the Democratic Party’s 2024 presidential defeat, delivering some of the sharpest criticism yet aimed at the former commander-in-chief from within his own party. Speaking at an event in Manhattan, Clinton called Biden’s decision to seek a second term at age 81 a catastrophic miscalculation — one she argued handed the White House back to President Donald Trump.
“He made a terrible mistake for himself, his legacy, and for the country,” Clinton told The New Yorker’s editor David Remnick during a wide-ranging conversation at the 92nd Street Y. The remarks came as Democrats continue to grapple with the causes of their 2024 collapse, now more than a year and a half removed from Election Day.
Clinton: A Competitive Primary Would Have Produced a Trump-Beating Nominee
Central to Clinton’s argument was that Biden had once privately committed to serving as a transitional figure — a bridge to the next generation of Democratic leadership — before reversing course and launching a full reelection campaign. Clinton said she believed that if Biden had honored that original plan and announced as early as the late summer of 2023 that he would not seek another term, the Democratic Party would have held a genuine nominating 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,” Clinton said. “So I think it was a terrible miscalculation on the part of President Biden.” The statement was notable in its breadth: Clinton did not single out Vice President Kamala Harris as uniquely unelectable, but rather argued that the process itself was fatally broken from the start.
The Debate Collapse and the Culture of Denial
Clinton also addressed the weeks following Biden’s disastrous June 2024 presidential debate against Trump — a performance that shocked the country and reignited urgent questions about the incumbent’s fitness for office. According to Clinton, those inside the White House responded not with honest self-assessment, but with entrenchment. “I know of a few people who tried that, and they were met with total denial — and not just from him but from the people around him,” she said. “There was a belief, and it was strongly held inside the White House, that he would win again.”
Clinton added that after the debate, the West Wing appeared to be in “a state of sort of disbelief about what happened.” She said Biden was ultimately persuaded to exit the race not by the concerns of allies or party leadership, but by the weight of polling data that could no longer be rationalized away. Biden formally withdrew from the race in late July 2024, immediately endorsing Harris — leaving her just three months to mount a national campaign before Election Day.
Harris Hamstrung by Biden’s Shadow
Clinton was direct about the structural disadvantages Harris faced in the compressed general election window, arguing that the vice president was caught in an impossible position: unable to meaningfully distance herself from an unpopular incumbent without appearing disloyal to the man who had elevated her. “Some people didn’t want to hear anything from any candidate, especially somebody that he picked to be the vice president, criticizing him,” Clinton said.
She argued that a candidate who had emerged from a competitive primary — a governor, a senator, or anyone untethered from the Biden administration — would have had far more political room to maneuver. “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,” Clinton said. A spokesman for Biden, TJ Ducklo, declined to comment on Clinton’s remarks.
The DNC Autopsy and What It Left Out
Clinton’s remarks arrived against the backdrop of a deeply troubled Democratic Party reckoning. In May 2026, the Democratic National Committee released its long-delayed post-election autopsy report — a 192-page document written by Democratic consultant Paul Rivera — but the report’s credibility was immediately undermined by its own shortcomings. The document was missing key sections, including a conclusion, an executive summary, and notes for the reader, and DNC Chair Ken Martin acknowledged the report was incomplete and unverifiable when he received it.
Critically, the autopsy avoided several of the most divisive questions fracturing the party since 2024 — including Biden’s initial decision to seek reelection and the question of how Harris assumed the nomination without a formal nominating process. Biden’s name appeared only a handful of times in the document, though one key takeaway the author suggested was that the White House “did not position or prepare” Harris to help govern — a failure that left her ill-equipped to launch a presidential campaign on 107 days’ notice.
A Long and Complicated Rivalry
The relationship between Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden runs deep — and has never been without tension. The two served at the apex of President Barack Obama’s administration simultaneously, with Biden as vice president and Clinton as secretary of state, and both spent years quietly contemplating a 2016 presidential run before Biden, grieving the death of his son Beau from brain cancer, ultimately stepped aside. Obama, who assessed Clinton as the stronger candidate at the time, gently discouraged Biden from entering that race.
Biden has never fully made peace with that decision. Over the years he has said publicly that he regrets not running in 2016 — telling reporters at one point, “I regret it every day” — and in 2017 stated flatly, “I think I could have won.” Even after withdrawing from the 2024 race, Biden maintained that he believed he could have defeated Trump had he stayed in.
Jill Biden’s Account of the Debate Night
Clinton’s interview came weeks after a separate and stunning account of the June 2024 debate emerged from inside the Biden family itself. In late May, first lady Jill Biden told CBS News Sunday Morning that she had been terrified watching her husband’s performance against Trump in real time. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke,'” Dr. Biden said — a remarkable admission from a figure who had been among the most forceful voices urging the president to remain in the race following that same debate.
Clinton’s Own History With Defeat
Monday’s remarks invited inevitable comparisons to Clinton’s own experience as a losing presidential candidate. Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 but lost key swing states to Trump in one of the most stunning upsets in modern American political history. She has attributed her loss to multiple external forces — including Russian election interference and then-FBI Director James Comey’s eleventh-hour announcement that his office was reviewing whether she had mishandled classified information on a private email server. She has also acknowledged personal missteps, including her use of that private server for government correspondence, which she called in 2017 “the most important of the mistakes I made.”
Democrats at a Crossroads
Whether Clinton’s blunt post-mortem gains traction within a Democratic Party still divided over how to reassemble itself remains to be seen. What is clear is that the conversation she is now forcing into the open — about Biden’s decision, the failed intervention efforts, and the structural trap Harris was placed in — is one that the party’s official autopsy declined to fully engage. With the 2026 midterms on the horizon and the 2028 presidential race beginning to take shape in the background, the debate over what truly went wrong in 2024 is far from settled.