Pete Buttigieg, ex-transportation secretary: President Biden ‘should not have run’ for reelection

Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s opinion on whether his former boss, President Joseph R. Biden, should have run for re-election has shifted from “maybe” to an outright no.

“He should not have run,” Mr. Buttigieg said Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press.” “And if he had made that decision sooner, we might have been better off.”

Mr. Buttigieg is considering a 2028 presidential run, and the question of whether Mr. Biden should have sought re-election has become a litmus test in the early jockeying for position among the possible Democratic contenders.

In her new memoir, “107 Days,” former Vice President Kamala Harris, who replaced Mr. Biden atop the Democratic ticket after his disastrous Atlanta debate performance, added more fuel to the fire, describing Mr. Biden’s re-election push as reckless.

’It’s Joe and Jill’s decision.’ We all said that, like a mantra, as if we’d all been hypnotized,” Ms. Harris writes, according to book excerpts. “Was it grace, or was it recklessness? In retrospect, I think it was recklessness.”

Mr. Buttigieg was less assertive about whether Mr. Biden should have left the race when asked in May about how the former president handled the situation.

“Maybe, you know, right now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think most people would agree that is the case,” he told reporters during an event in Iowa.

Mr. Buttigieg, a former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who now resides in Michigan, was the surprise of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary race. He won the Iowa caucuses and finished a close second to Sen. Bernard Sanders, Vermont independent, in the first-in-the-nation New Hampshire primary.

But his campaign lost steam in part because he struggled with Black voters who were far more familiar with Mr. Biden and, at times, struggled with Mr. Buttigieg’s being gay.