Joe Biden, whose central campaign message is that he is the only candidate who can beat President Trump in 2020, said he doesn’t know if he could have pulled off the feat in the last presidential election.
“I don’t know,” he told New York Magazine when asked if he could have beaten Trump in 2016. “Everybody says that. But look, I don’t know. You’ve got to be in the game. I thought Hillary would have made a good president.”
The former vice president decided not to run at the time, citing the death of his son Beau Biden, who died from brain cancer in 2015. Ted Kaufman, a close friend and informal adviser to Biden, said he would have run for president if Beau had not become sick.
In January, Biden said he thought Trump won because “people are scared.”
“People are wondering whether we really care about their plight, those of us who hold public office,” he said, adding that when voters believe government is failing them, they become “susceptible to demagoguery.”
Biden’s chief strategist Mike Donilon said the campaign sees this election as “really about character and values as opposed to issues and ideology.”
Biden, who has thus far been the front-runner in the polls, dismissed whether losing this election would be humiliating for him.
“Everybody said, ‘Well, wouldn’t it be awful if you lost?’ I know what loss is, man. Losing the race is not loss in the same sense,” he said, referring to losing his son to cancer, and his daughter and first wife in car crash in 1972.
