Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg calls on an audience member to ask a question during a town hall hosted by VoteVets on May 13, 2025 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

WASHINGTON – Former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg said in a new interview that former President Joe Biden should have stayed out of the presidential race in 2024.

“He should not have run, and if he had made that decision sooner, we might have been better off,” Buttigieg told NBC News’ Kristen Welker on “Meet the Press” on Sept. 14.

“But it literally was his decision. Nobody else was able to make that decision, and now in front of us, we're confronted with the decisions that come next, whether that's inside of a political party or movement, or as we're all weighing right now in our own lives as Americans, as a country, and that's where we've got to focus,” he added.

His remarks come after former Vice President Kamala Harris wrote in her new memoir, “107 Days,” which details her 2024 presidential campaign, that it was “recklessness” that drove so many people around Biden to defer to the aging president and his wife about his reelection decision.

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

Biden dropped out of the race in July of 2024 and endorsed Harris for president, just months before the election. Harris became the Democratic nominee and lost to President Donald Trump in November.

Buttigieg told Welker that he was not involved in the process of deciding whether Biden should run again.

“I think I'm not alone in believing that he should have made the decision not to run sooner,” he said.

Contributing: Francesca Chambers

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Pete Buttigieg says Biden 'should not have run' for reelection in 2024

Reporting by Sudiksha Kochi, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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