Let's be clear that everything any of us thinks (or says here) is speculative at best.
Given the narrowness of Trump's win over the 25 years of negative baggage HRC brought to the race (compounded by the email scandal), I figure Biden beats Trump maybe by a little less than Obama beat Romney. Lost in a lot of the blame game has been the fact that - ridiculous as he is - Trump followed a perfect plan for winning the Electoral College. It was a plan that any Republican running should have been willing to do but didn't: don't waste time going to the states Romney won easily and set up camp in Florida, NC/VA, and the Rust Belt and stay there the entire campaign.
His smarts in doing this has been lost in the dumbness of everything else Trump.
But I don't think that strategy would have worked against Biden, either.
The central question of the entire thing is: how much of Trump's vote was anti-Hillary more than anything else? That is the question we would need to answer to get a better idea of how the race played out.
And I seriously doubt Joseph Biden, generally considered one of the "nice guys" in politics on both sides of the aisle (a sort of modern GHW Bush if you will) would have made that comment about Trump's voters being "deplorable."
I just don't think Biden would've ran a totally different campaign strategy than HRC, and why should he with so many prior election results?
Biden is old school, so I slightly disagree here. I can tell you one thing right now Biden would have done: he would have actually gone into Wisconsin during the campaign. And he's Catholic, which is much of the base vote there, so he probably carries the Badger state for starters.
He likely carries PA as well as he was actually born there, so he does the whole "pilgrimage home" thing, and it's a good story.
I think the biggest advantage of him being the nominee is that he wouldn't have united as many republicans against him as HRC. The Republicans haven't won WI, PA, and MI since the 1980's, so why figure that the buffoon would pull it off?
If Hillary had listened to her advisers who were telling her this all along, the outcome is different. She got a memo in May warning her to add 3-4 points to whatever Trump was polling (Parmes and Allen covered this in "Shattered," which was originally intended to be a book about her winning).
Hell, if she would have listened to HER HUSBAND, she would have won. There's a lot of things I don't like about Bill Clinton, but the guy understands that your whole purpose is you go in and snag what you can of the voters who - in identity politics - are against you. And while the GOP might not have won Wisconsin since 1988, Bush lost the state by less than 6,000 votes in 2000 (and Pat Buchanan got 11,000 votes), and by 11,000 in 2004 (he actually led in virtually every single poll in WI in 2004, so much so that it's the only state I got wrong that year - because while my gut told me it's a left-leaning state, it's hard to argue with every single respectable poll across the board).
I think the strategy would've been what it always has been and that is to win enough toss up states. I still think NC, OH, and FL go to Trump because of how and where he campaigned, but the real question(s) are 1) do the faithless objectors remain faithless and 2) what happens in MI and WI? Again I think Biden wins PA going away, but I just cant see him winning both WI and MI given that I cant see his campaign manager worrying about those states any differently than HRC.
1) The faithless elector scenario was only believed by people who actually think there's a such thing as free health care.
2) I think Biden wins all three. Hillary lost the MI primary to Sanders, the critical point in the Democratic race.
I think the following weigh in Biden's favor over Hillary
- no email scandal
- no deplorables remark
- does Sanders cut Biden as deeply as he did her?
- he's generally liked by the opposition
- he has experience enough to "play the statesman"
- he's actually from PA
- he was a more direct link as an Obama successor (for those who liked Obama but were lukewarm to HRC)
- he could have more believably talked about the Russian interference story that broke on the same day as the Billy Bush tape
- Trump could not have successfully pivoted on his own tape scandal by, say, referencing Biden's wife the way he did Hillary's husband
I think the following are easy marks against him
- when the Obamacare premiums rose in October 2016, what was he supposed to say?
- it's difficult to win what is, in essence, a "third term" for even the most popular incumbent (it's very hard to run for Prez from the VP slot)
- does Hillary cut him in the primary with references to him opposing the Bin Laden raid?
- does his candidacy pre-empt Bernie Sanders and propel Hillary to the nomination easier?
- he has a tendency to mis-speak and look dumber than he really is
- or do he and Hillary split the same vote and propel Sanders to the nomination?
And......is there something out there we don't know that destroys him a la Gary Hart, Herman Cain, or even Biden himself in 1987?
Just a note here: myths grow about candidacies that win, the naive idea that the winning campaign "ran a perfect campaign." Nobody runs a perfect campaign. I lived through the 1980 Reagan campaign, where he wiped the floor with Jimmy Carter. It's easy to look back now and say his win was inevitable, but on October 14 that year, Reagan trailed Carter in his private polling for the only time post-Convention. They rummaged around and came up with the idea of "appointing a woman to ONE OF THE FIRST Supreme Court nominations" that came up. It was intentionally worded that way to give him wiggle room. But the fact is that the landslide didn't materialize until after Reagan bludgeoned Carter in the debate, not because Reagan was impressive but primarily because Carter's whole case was, "He's going to start WW3." And Reagan didn't look anything at all like a mad bomber in the debate; Carter had so exaggerated what a risk Reagan was, he won the debate merely by standing there for 90 minutes and not blowing his stack.
But having lived through that particular campaign, Reagan blundered through July and August, and said so many dumb things that his mental capacity was called into question and Reagan actually said that if any rumors arose about that old coot in the White House, he'd gladly take a senility test. He said Creationism should be taught as science in the public schools, sided with Taiwan over China, said that Carter was opening his campaign in Tuscumbia, Alabama, which Reagan informed everyone was "the birthplace of the Ku Klux Klan," confused oxides in an environmental speech, and just made a damned fool of himself to be blunt about it.
They huddled on Labor Day weekend and told him the facts of life......and then he got lucky when Carter decided he could finish him off by basically saying Reagan wanted a war. The press pretty much did the rest by actually finding Carter's comments reprehensible.
I only use that as a point of reference. Times have changed in terms of the 24 hour news cycle, but the basics are still the same. Nobody runs a perfect campaign, and there's no way to know Biden would have done any better. I surmise, however, he would have entered the swim contest with less baggage.