Harris says Biden’s decision to run for reelection was 'recklessness'
WASHINGTON (TNND) — Former Vice President Kamala Harris said it was a mistake not to question President Joe Biden’s decision on running for reelection despite rampant questions about his age and ability to continue leading the country in excerpts of her new book about her sprint to the 2024 presidential election.
In her new book, “107 Days,” about her sudden rise to the Democratic presidential nominee after Biden dropped out of the race amid fierce pushback over his advanced age, Harris wrote that she and other Democrats were reckless in allowing Biden to run.
“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps,” she wrote in an excerpt published on Wednesday in The Atlantic. “But the American people had chosen him before in the same matchup. Maybe he was right to believe that they would do so again.”
In her telling, she was in the “worst position to make the case that he should drop out” under the belief Biden would view it as disloyalty and that she and others were giving Biden and then-first lady Jill Biden “grace” allowing them to make the decision.
“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.”
It was the first time Harris was openly critical of Biden’s decision to run for reelection, a decision the party is still grappling with locked out of power in Washington until at least the 2026 midterms. Biden only dropped out of the race after weeks of public and private pressure built up following a disastrous debate performance against now-President Donald Trump, which vaulted Harris into the Democratic nomination in an election that resulted in the first popular vote victory for Republicans since 2004.
More high-profile Democrats have addressed Biden’s age and concerns of decline in recent months as time has passed and the 2024 election gets further in the rear view. Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy said he had “no doubt” Biden had cognitive decline while in office and California Rep. Ro Khanna said the party “made a mistake” supporting his reelection.
Multiple older Democratic lawmakers have also addressed the party’s issue with age with a wave of retirements over the last year with stated goals of passing the torch to the next generation, a nod to Democrats’ sensitivity to the age question.
While Harris wrote that Biden should not have run for reelection, she disputed that Biden’s age caused issues for his ability to lead the country and said he was deeply knowledgeable and more compassionate than Trump.
“But at 81, Joe got tired,” Harris wrote. “That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles. I don’t think it’s any surprise that the debate debacle happened right after two back-to-back trips to Europe and a flight to the West Coast for a Hollywood fundraiser. I don’t believe it was incapacity. If I believed that, I would have said so. As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”
Harris’ new admissions have raised questions from some about why she didn’t raise the point sooner or contrasted herself to Biden more during the campaign. Some analysts saw her refusal to break with Biden as a major issue for her campaign as Trump and other Republicans sought to define her and the administration as out of touch.
“There's no way she could have done that, and it would have made her look bad too,” said Ray La Raja, a political science professor and co-director of the UMass Amherst poll. “That was a no-win situation for her. She could have contrasted herself more sharply from the president and said, ‘we built the foundation, but here's where we need to go.’ Her campaign was a very good technical campaign, but bereft of any sense of direction, of ideas, of inspiring ways the Democratic Party should go.”
The book’s release is sure to bring attention back to the debate over how the party should have handled Biden’s desire to run for a second term, which comes as Democrats are still trying to sort through what went so wrong in 2024 and how to move the party forward in 2026 and 2028.
It is also likely to fuel speculation about her future ambitions to run for the presidential nomination again in 2028. She opted against running for governor of California in 2026 but has left her options open about running for president again.
Frustrations among its voters are reaching all-time highs amid perceptions its leaders are not doing enough to combat Trump and his congressional majorities. The wings of the party want to see it move in opposite directions and there is no clear path forward to building a platform to win back voters that have drifted toward Trump over the last three cycles.
“The issue is the Democrats have bigger problems than Kamala Harris' campaign,” La Raja said.
