The former Vice-President is right and wrong here. Hillary never showed her personality during the campaign trail and was sort of robotic sometimes. She wasn’t a good candidate due to the, mostly baseless, email scandal but mainly she just wasn’t a good candidate for this election. She represented to a lot of voters the “establishment”. But had this been the matchup in 2008 or 2012, Hillary would have trounced Trump by 40. Hillary had just about everything for those previous elections except one thing: being a political outsider and it hurt her the most in this election.
This isn’t the first example of a good candidate in the wrong election. Take 1944, for example, Thomas Dewey ran against FDR. He was a good candidate but he could never have won. FDR was extremely popular and the war was going in America’s favor. Maybe later on given the right circumstances Dewey would have been elected. Again, in 1968 Hubert Humphrey was a good candidate but his refusal to stand up to LBJ on the Vietnam War and Nixon’s anti-war stance made him a bad candidate in the election.
In 2016, Hillary was the wrong candidate because of her “establishment” ties, the email scandal, and the Benghazi witch hunt. It looked to many like Hillary was getting off the hook in July when Comey, in their eyes, had basically admitted Hillary broke the law but nothing would be done. They ran with that but didn’t hear Comey when he said that no prosecutor would take the case because it would essentially be impossible to prove the Clinton camp meant to leak classified information, which of course they didn’t. It was simply carelessness on Clinton’s end. Then with Benghazi, Republicans latched on to it and made sure it would never leave the public eye by creating a special committee and having 8 different investigations into the subject. They cared nothing about the people killed in Libya it was a partisan use of tax payers dollars to attack Hillary Clinton. And in the conclusion of each investigation, they found nothing each and every time.
So in some ways, Biden is right and wrong. She wasn’t a great candidate for this election but had the year been different she would have won or just had the circumstances for the 2016 election been different she would have trounced Trump. Perhaps the former Vice-President would have beaten Trump due to him being, for the most part, scandal free. But Biden would still have had establishment ties that could have turned him off to some voters; he was after all a Senator for nearly 40 years and Vice-President for 8 years.