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Joe Biden ‘Planned on Running for President’ in 2016 Election: ‘I Think I Could Have Won’

Joe Biden
Joe BidenCheriss May/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Ready for the Oval Office? During a visit to Colgate University in New York on Friday, March 24, former Vice President Joe Biden said he believes he could have won the 2016 election.

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“On a college campus I will never, never do anything other than answer the question completely unvarnished and straightforward,” the politician, 74, said at a lecture Q&A panel when asked if he regrets not running for president last year. “The answer is that I had planned on running for president. And although it would have been a very difficult primary, I think I could have won.”

According to Utica’s Observer-Dispatch, Biden told students that he had collected a lot of data and was confident that as a Democratic nominee, he could have become the 45th POTUS. “At the end of the day, I just couldn’t do it,” he added. “So, I don’t regret not running. Do I regret not being president? Yes.”

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The former Delaware senator also cited his late son Beau Biden’s battle with brain cancer as one of the reasons he stayed out of the presidential race, though he said Beau, who died in May 2015, had wanted him to run. “I didn’t run because no man or woman should announce they’re running for president of the United States unless they can look the public in the eye and promise you they can give you 100 percent,” he added.

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Students and staff at Colgate University were excited to hear Biden speak. “We don’t just vote for our party. We vote for who we think is the better candidate,” university custodian Debra Dickensen, who is a Republican, told the Observer-Dispatch. Her husband, Wendell Dickensen, added, “I think [Biden is] an extremely intelligent person. I think if he had run, I would have liked to have heard what he had to say.”

At the end of his visit, Biden spoke candidly about President Donald Trump, saying, “I really hope he grows into the job a little bit. I don’t have a lot of hope right now. … I hope that he succeeds.”

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