Hillary Clinton Says Joe Biden Made a “Terrible Mistake” Running for Reelection… And She’s Done Beating That “Horse”

Hillary Clinton has never been one to dodge a direct question, and on Monday, June 15, she did not start now.

Sitting across from New Yorker editor David Remnick at the 92nd Street Y in New York City, the former secretary of state delivered what may be her sharpest public assessment yet of Joe Biden’s decision to seek a second term in 2024, a decision she says cost Democrats the White House and damaged Biden’s own legacy in the process.

When Remnick asked her directly whether Biden had made a “terrible mistake” by running again, Clinton did not hesitate. “He made a terrible mistake,” she said. “He made a terrible mistake for himself, his legacy, and for the country.”

She went further still, calling it “a terrible miscalculation on the part of President Biden.” Coming from someone who has known Biden for decades and shared a complicated political history with him, the bluntness landed.

Why Clinton Believes Biden Should Have Stepped Aside

Hillary Clinton’s argument hinges on a promise she says Biden made and ultimately broke. “He had said that he would not run again, and you know, counterfactual narratives are always a bit tricky,” she explained.

“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 the torch to the next generation, we would have had a real contest.” In her view, that contest would have produced a stronger nominee.

She told Remnick that whoever emerged from a real Democratic primary “would have beaten Donald Trump,” whether that candidate was the sitting vice president, a governor, a senator, or someone else entirely.

The trouble, according to Clinton, is that Biden never created that opening. “But once he didn’t move and did not 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,” she said.

That dilemma became impossible to ignore after Biden’s widely panned debate performance against Trump in June 2024, a moment Clinton described in surprisingly personal terms. “It was a moment of disbelief,” she said of watching the debate.

“I thought maybe he had taken medication for a cold or for some kind of virus or something, that it had affected his ability to respond in a quick and expected way.”

She added that she initially assumed something physical had happened to him in the moment, rather than a sign of a deeper, ongoing decline.

What followed is now well-documented history. Biden withdrew from the race in late July 2024 and endorsed Kamala Harris, who inherited a presidential campaign with a fraction of the runway a typical nominee would have.

Clinton did not shy away from acknowledging how steep that climb was for Harris, even as she stopped short of directly criticizing the decision to install her as the nominee without a contested primary.

The compressed timeline, by Clinton’s own account, was part of the broader fallout from Biden staying in the race as long as he did.

The Behind-the-Scenes Pressure Campaign Nobody Saw

One of the more pointed moments of the conversation came when Remnick pressed Clinton on why party heavyweights never voiced their concerns publicly.

“Why didn’t anybody say so?” Remnick asked, after Clinton had described the “terrible dilemma” Biden’s refusal to step aside had created. “A select group of people with powerful voices, whether Nancy Pelosi, Barack Obama, et cetera. Nobody said this.”

Clinton’s response made clear that silence in public did not mean inaction in private. She said “there were a lot of conversations going on behind the scenes” and that she herself “participated in a number of them, but there was no way to convince him by going public.”

She also revealed that those close to Biden who tried to raise concerns directly were rebuffed. “I know of a few people who tried [approaching Biden],” she said. “And they were met with total denial. And not just from him, but from the people around him.”

According to Clinton, part of what kept Biden and his inner circle confident was the data they were seeing internally.

She said Biden was convinced by what polling at the time showed about the state of the race, suggesting his team believed, right up until the debate forced a reckoning, that he was still positioned to win.

That gap between internal confidence, and public perception is, in many ways, the crux of Clinton’s critique, a campaign operating on assumptions that didn’t survive contact with a national audience.

Despite laying all of this out in detail, Clinton made clear she has little appetite for relitigating it endlessly. “But look, it happened. It’s over. It’s behind us. I don’t think it’s useful to keep beating that horse,” she said.

When Remnick tried to push toward one more retrospective question, Clinton initially resisted, then relented with a flash of her trademark dry humor. “Okay, beat one more horse. No,” she said, before Remnick clarified, “Different horse.” Clinton replied, “Poor horse.”

Then, catching her own mixed metaphor, she corrected herself: “It’s a donkey.” Remnick laughed in recognition, telling her, “I know that joke. It’s a good joke.”

A Complicated Legacy, Acknowledged on Both Sides

For all her criticism, Clinton did not paint Biden as a failed president overall. She pointed out that Biden beat Trump “in a huge landslide victory in the popular vote” in 2020, adding, “I think that says a lot.”

It is a reminder that Clinton’s frustration is specifically about the 2024 decision-making, not a wholesale rewrite of Biden’s presidency or his earlier electoral success.

The timing of Clinton’s remarks is notable, too. Her comments arrive on the heels of former First Lady Jill Biden’s own admission in her memoir that she had wondered whether her husband was having a stroke during the disastrous June 2024 debate, even though, publicly at the time, Jill Biden praised her husband for doing a “great job” and for having “answered all the questions.”

The contrast between the private doubt and the public messaging from those closest to Biden has become something of a recurring theme as more insiders speak out.

Clinton’s interview also lands as some Democrats are actively pushing party leadership for a more honest accounting of what went wrong in 2024, ahead of the 2028 presidential cycle.

She is far from alone in offering a postmortem. Actor and longtime Democratic donor George Clooney, who authored a widely discussed New York Times op-ed in July 2024 urging Biden to step aside, has also weighed in publicly on the aftermath.

Clooney told CBS Sunday Morning that while he stands by writing the op-ed, he believes installing Harris as the nominee without a primary was its own misstep.

“I think the mistake with it being Kamala is she had to run against her own record,” he said. “It’s very hard to do if the point of running is to say, ‘I’m not that person.’ It’s hard to do, and so she was given a very tough task. I think it was a mistake, quite honestly. But we are where we are.”

Taken together, Clinton’s remarks read less like an attack and more like an unusually candid autopsy from someone who was in the room for many of the conversations that shaped 2024, even if she insists she’s done dwelling on it.

Whether other senior Democrats follow her lead and speak this openly before 2028 remains to be seen. For now, Clinton has said her piece, cracked her joke about the donkey, and signaled she’s ready to leave the horse alone.