After years of having Joe Biden’s back, New Hampshire Democrats are officially done.
For years, New Hampshire Democratic Party chair Ray Buckley declined to blame Biden for the decision to pull the state’s First in the Nation presidential primary status, instead pointing a finger at the DNC.
But in a new article at The Dispatch, Buckley puts the blame squarely on Biden.
“If it wasn’t for the White House, we would have been in fine shape,” Buckley said.
And in published excerpts from a new book on the 2024 campaign, former U.S. Rep. Annie Kuster admits she knew Biden was unfit to serve long before he dropped out of the race.
In an excerpt of “Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again” published in The New Yorker, CNN’s Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson of Axios recount events at a June 15, 2024, Biden fundraiser in California starring actor George Clooney and former President Barack Obama.
“Even some supporters present in the arena wondered what was going on” as they watched Biden attempt to address the crowd.
“‘He doesn’t look like he knows where he’s supposed to go,’ thought the New Hampshire Democratic congresswoman Annie Kuster, sitting in the audience with the California congresswoman Julia Brownley. They’d seen him in the photo line, and Kuster could tell it was a struggle for the President to engage. It reminded her of being with an aging grandparent, worryingly thinking, Oh, my gosh, what’s going to happen next?” they wrote.
“Kuster had already reached the conclusion that there was no scenario in which Biden would be reelected. She turned to Brownley. ‘We can’t go out there and campaign for ‘four more years,’ she said. ‘That’s just not tenable.’”
In new books, magazine articles, and public speeches, Democrats are now admitting what they denied during the 2024 campaign: Biden was unfit to serve another four year term, and they knew it.
“We got so screwed by Biden, as a party,” former Biden campaign manager David Plouffe says in the Tapper-Thompson book, “He totally f***ed us.”
And Biden’s own transportation secretary, Pete Buttigieg, admitted at a rally in Iowa Tuesday night that Democrats “maybe” would have fared better last year had Biden not sought reelection.
“Right now, with the benefit of hindsight, I think most people would agree that that’s the case,” according to Politico’s reporting on Buttigieg’s remarks. “We’re also not in a position to wallow in hindsight.”
And yet, Buckley, Kuster, and the rest of New Hampshire’s Democratic leadership remained enthusiastic supporters of Biden in the days leading up to his decision to cave into pressure from his party and leave the race.
Just two weeks after the West Coast fundraiser, Kuster took to social media to support Biden and his performance in his disastrous debate with Donald Trump.
“Tonight, the choice was clear—President Biden and Vice President Harris are the leaders we need to move our country forward to build a future worthy of pride,” Kuster wrote in a June 27 social media post. “Onward!”
And U.S. Sen. Maggie Hassan told reporters after a July 11, 2024, meeting with Biden that she “continued to support the president. This is a really strong campaign. Here’s President Biden, one of the most successful presidents — perhaps the most successful president — in my lifetime.”
Requests for comment from Hassan, Kuster, and her spokesperson at the time — who now works for Rep. Maggie Goodlander — went unanswered.
“It’s not shocking Annie Kuster thought this about Biden, but it is shocking she privately told reporters one thing and then publicly told the people of New Hampshire the opposite,” said Matthew Bartlett, a Republican strategist and Nashua native. “I’m not sure what she thought her constituents would think about her contradiction when this was published.
“Her own words are stunning hypocrisy.”
