'I was very concerned.' U.S. Rep. Adam Smith reflects on Biden's 2024 presidential campaign

It's perhaps easy for Democrats to critique Joe Biden and Kamala Harris' presidential runs, now that the election is decided, but Washington Congressmember Adam Smith says that he had concerns about Biden for a few years.

"I think it was a really bad decision on behalf of Joe Biden and the people around him to decide to have him run again," Smith told NPR's Steve Inskeep.

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At the start of summer 2024, particularly after a poor debate performance with Republican Donald Trump, Smith was among a growing chorus of Democrats calling for Biden to step aside and let another party member run for the White House.

In July, Smith openly called for Biden to drop out of the race, saying "the stakes are simply too high." He added that the president should drop out as soon as possible, "to give the new ticket the maximum amount of time to make its case to the American people." When Vice President Kamala Harris took Biden's place, she had just over 100 days to campaign for president.

Inskeep's conversation with Congressmember Smith comes on the heels of a Wall Street Journal report, detailing the experiences of a handful of Democrats who spoke of difficulty scheduling meetings with the president, limited communication, and a tight inner circle around Biden.

Smith said he started developing an opinion about Biden, and a potential run for a second term, back in 2021, the president's first year in office. At the time, the United States was planning its exit from Afghanistan. As the lead Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, Smith was highly anxious about the situation. He reached out to the White House and requested a meeting with the president.

"I was concerned that they were being overly optimistic about what was going to play out," Smith said. "But more than anything, I just wanted an interaction with the White House to talk about it, share policy concerns and where we're going in anticipation of the Afghan government collapsing once we pulled out."

Smith never heard back from the president in the lead up to the withdrawal. White House staff said they would try to get a meeting scheduled, but nothing happened. That's not too unusual. Presidents are very busy. But Smith felt an issue like leaving Afghanistan was important enough to prompt a conversation.

"I was not worried at all about the president's ability to do the job," Smith said. "I was not worried that he had any sort of mental problem or that he was not physically healthy to do the job. But the second piece of it is, and I've said this before, I never for one second thought it was a good idea for Joe Biden to run at the age of 82 for a second term. I had those concerns. There wasn't any particular reason at that point to go out publicly and start saying, 'Oh, he shouldn't run again.' That was 2021."

When discussions for the next presidential campaign started up in 2022 and 2023, Smith said his fears of a second Biden run began to take shape.

"I was very concerned as it appeared that Trump was increasingly likely to come back as the nominee and it put all of us in a really difficult position," Smith said. "So, when the (2024) debate happened and it became clear that President Biden was not ready to run again, that's when I did choose to speak out. Prior to that, I didn't think me stepping up and saying anything was going to have any impact on him not running again. We would have just weakened our only nominee."

With Trump headed to the White House in 2025, Democrats are now looking ahead the next election. Smith says there are lessons from the Biden years that they should heed.

"When you get elected president, there is something about it. It's an incredible accomplishment," he said. "It's awfully easy to start thinking that every decision you ever have made in your life is right. You really have to work hard to make sure you still surround yourself with people who give you critical thinking."

"Second, I think the Democratic Party sometimes struggles to make judgments about people. It's not disrespectful ... I'm the top Democrat in the Armed Services Committee. If it gets to the point where people question whether or not I'm up to the job, they should take me on. I think Democrats, much more so than Republicans, have a tendency to not want to make those kinds of judgments and force that kind of competition. And I think it does hurt us."

Listen to Congressmember Adam Smith's full interview with NPR here.