Harris Calls Democrats’ Deference to Biden ‘Recklessness’ in New Book

Former Vice President Kamala Harris said it was a mistake not to question President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s insistence on running for re-election last year despite his advanced age.

In a new book, she writes that it was “recklessness” that led her and other Democrats to cede the choice “to an individual’s ego.”

Ms. Harris’s assertion places her alongside scores of other figures in the Democratic Party who, since President Trump took office, have publicly admitted that Mr. Biden’s re-election effort at age 81 was a mistake. Long before Mr. Biden’s disastrous debate performance against Mr. Trump in June 2024, Democrats had privately questioned whether he should run again.

“During all those months of growing panic, should I have told Joe to consider not running? Perhaps,” she wrote in an excerpt from her forthcoming book 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.”

The former vice president described herself as “in the worst position to make the case that he should drop out” of the 2024 race because she believed Mr. Biden would view such an entreaty as disloyal. At the time, she and others extended “grace” in allowing Mr. Biden and Jill Biden, the first lady, to make the decision on their own. But now, she wrote, she has come to believe it was a mistake not to speak up.

“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.”

Ms. Harris dismissed any notion that Mr. Biden was not mentally or physically fit to serve as president.

“But at 81, Joe got tired,” she wrote. “That’s when his age showed in physical and verbal stumbles.”

Ms. Harris is by far the most prominent Democrat to publicly second-guess Mr. Biden’s decision to run for a second term. Pete Buttigieg, who was his transportation secretary, said in May that it was “maybe” a mistake.

Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut said he had “no doubt” Mr. Biden suffered cognitive decline while in office. Representative Ro Khanna of California said “our party made a mistake” supporting him. And Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania said earlier this year that he had warned Mr. Biden’s team as early as 2022 that the president was at risk of losing his pivotal swing state.

Ms. Harris, who vehemently defended Mr. Biden after his halting performance against Mr. Trump in the 2024 presidential debate, said that his schedule in the weeks before — including back-to-back trips to Europe and then a West Coast fund-raiser — revealed the limits of his stamina.

She denied that she believed he was incapacitated. “If I believed that, I would have said so,” she added. “As loyal as I am to President Biden, I am more loyal to my country.”

Ms. Harris also wrote about feeling undermined by unspecified members of Mr. Biden’s team, but didn’t take aim at the former president himself. However, in recalling an 11-minute speech he made from the Oval Office, she wrote that her staff noted she was mentioned only fleetingly, in the eighth minute.

“And that was it,” she wrote. “I am a loyal person.”

She lamented that throughout her time in office, Mr. Biden’s team didn’t defend her against right-wing attacks about her competence, including a drumbeat of conservative commentary about her laugh, nor push back on media stories that she said reported “unfair or inaccurate” accounts. She also accused his White House aides of helping fuel negative narratives.

“And when the stories were unfair or inaccurate, the president’s inner circle seemed fine with it,” she wrote. “Indeed, it seemed as if they decided I should be knocked down a little bit more.”

She specifically cited stories about high staff turnover in her office and the “chaotic” nature of her first year as vice president, and how the White House communications team didn’t help her effectively push back against Republicans’ “mischaracterization” of her role as “border czar,” a role that Mr. Biden had assigned her.

The former vice president does not name those she felt wronged her.

But she was clear that she believed many in Mr. Biden’s inner circle were not invested in her success.

“Their thinking was zero-sum: If she’s shining, he’s dimmed,” Ms. Harris wrote. “None of them grasped that if I did well, he did well. That given the concerns about his age, my visible success as his vice president was vital. It would serve as a testament to his judgment in choosing me and reassurance that if something happened, the country was in good hands. My success was important for him. His team didn’t get it.”

Kelly Scully, a Biden spokeswoman, declined to comment.

In the weeks after Ms. Harris entered her 107-day race for the White House, officials in Mr. Biden’s inner circle acknowledged that they had not done enough to position her for the challenge she faced to save Mr. Biden’s legacy.

Ron Klain, Mr. Biden’s former White House chief of staff, described Ms. Harris as a cautious, deliberate and loyal vice president in an interview last year with The New York Times. But he acknowledged that she did not always get the backing she deserved.

“We were all united behind the idea she should be successful. We just didn’t find the path to do it,” he said. “People really liked her. There’s a lot of enthusiasm for her. And I don’t think we did a good enough job of selling her.”

Mr. Klain mentioned Ms. Harris’s accomplishments in leading the White House’s response to the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade in 2023, which the former vice president acknowledged in her book the president struggled to communicate.

“Joe struggled to talk about reproductive rights in a way that met the gravity of the moment,” she wrote. “He ceded that leadership to me.”

The excerpt published on Wednesday was accompanied by an endorsement of the book from The Atlantic’s editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, who called it “slyly funny” and “newsworthy.”

The magazine is owned by Laurene Powell Jobs, a friend of Ms. Harris’s who spent election night with her at the Naval Observatory, according to the book “2024,” published earlier this year by the journalists Tyler Pager, Josh Dawsey and Isaac Arnsdorf. (Mr. Pager is now a White House correspondent for the Times.)

Ms. Harris’s book is slated to publish on Sept. 23.