Joe Biden, like a lot of us, wishes he could do 2016 all over again, and he made that sentiment public while speaking at a conference in Las Vegas on Thursday. “I never thought [Hillary Clinton] was the correct candidate,” Barack Obama’s vice president said. “I thought I was the correct candidate.”
Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.
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Democrats have already spent a lot of time relitigating the 2016 election—so much so that “Bernie would have won” is now a kidding-on-the-square meme—and Biden’s musings just give hindsight-obsessed lefties another alternate timeline to consider. Maybe Bernie Sanders or Biden would have bested Donald Trump in a hypothetical general election, but Sanders made some tactical errors early on in the primaries that allowed Clinton to build up a delegate lead, and Biden (still reeling from the death of his son) decided not to run.
But why talk about an election that already happened when you can talk about an election that is literally years away? During the conference, Biden also dropped hints that he “may very well run” run in 2020, when he’ll be 74 years old. Who even knows what the political landscape will be by then, but as a candidate, Biden would combine the relative centrism of the Obama wing of the Democratic Party with the ability to engage in some fiery blue-collar rhetoric—which Clinton was never able to do convincingly. His 2016 Democratic National Convention speech showed what that would have looked like:
Some poll found that Biden would beat Trump in a hypothetical election, but who cares?
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