Hillary Clinton suggested in a new interview that the Democratic Party’s loss in 2024 boiled down to a “terrible miscalculation” — President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s decision to run for re-election.
At an event in Manhattan on Monday, Mrs. Clinton told The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, that Mr. Biden had made a “terrible mistake for himself, his legacy and for the country” in trying to run again at age 81.
If Mr. Biden had decided to “pass the torch” and the Democratic Party had held a competitive presidential primary, Mrs. Clinton told Mr. 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.”
Mrs. Clinton’s assessment came at moment of renewed scrutiny of the mistakes that led to Vice President Kamala Harris’s loss to Mr. 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 Ms. Harris for the race before Mr. Biden’s late exit. (It did not deeply analyze Mr. Biden’s initial decision to run for re-election.)
And in late May, Jill Biden, Mr. Biden’s wife, told “CBS News Sunday Morning” that she had been “scared” during Mr. Biden’s disastrous performance against Mr. Trump in the first 2024 presidential debate. “I thought, ‘Oh, my God, he’s having a stroke,’” said Dr. Biden, who pushed her husband to stay in the race after the debate.
Mr. Biden ultimately left the race in late July 2024, immediately putting his weight behind Ms. Harris, his vice president, but leaving her just three months to build her own campaign before Election Day.
Mrs. Clinton and Mr. 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 — Mr. Biden as vice president and Mrs. Clinton as secretary of state — and both contemplated running for president in 2016 before Mr. Biden decided not to do so.
Mr. Obama assessed Mrs. Clinton to be a stronger candidate than Mr. Biden, who was grieving his son Beau’s death from brain cancer. And Mr. Obama gently discouraged his vice president from running that year.
Over the years, Mr. Biden has at times expressed remorse that he did not enter the race in 2016. Even before Mrs. 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.
Mrs. Clinton told Mr. Remnick that Democrats who had tried to persuade Mr. 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.”
Mrs. Clinton said Ms. 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 Mr. Biden.
“Some people didn’t want to hear anything from any candidate, especially somebody that he picked to be the vice president, criticizing him,” Mrs. Clinton told Mr. 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 spokesman for Mr. Biden, TJ Ducklo, declined to comment on Mrs. Clinton’s remarks.
Mrs. Clinton won the popular vote in 2016 but lost key swing states to Mr. 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.
Mrs. Clinton blamed a number of forces beyond her control for her loss, including Russian interference and the decision by the F.B.I. director at the time, James B. Comey, to announce at the height of the election that his office was reviewing whether Mrs. 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.”
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