Sen. Ben Sasse said Wednesday that former Vice President Joe Biden would have trounced President Trump in a “landslide” if he ran instead of Hillary Clinton.

Ana Marie Cox of The New York Times Magazine asked the Nebraska Republican if he thought Mr. Trump won because all the political infighting made voters write off all politicians as crooks.

“I would argue pretty vociferously that it’s also because of who his opponent was,” Mr. Sasse responded.

“If Joe Biden would have run against Donald Trump, Biden would have won in a landslide,” he added.

Mr. Sasse, who has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump since months before his nomination, said he couldn’t comprehend how Republicans and Democrats are going to be able to work together on some of the nation’s most important issues, like security.

“I’m the third or fourth most conservative guy by voting record in the institution, and yet most of the stuff I care about is not really partisan,” he told The Times. “We have had no foreign policy for the past 28 years for dealing with a post-Cold War world. And now you layer on nonstate actors, like jihadis, who have a presence in a quarter to a third of all the countries in the world, and the governments in those countries aren’t the main source of power anymore.

“But that isn’t anywhere near what keeps the spies and generals up at night, about how cyberattacks will transform war and create all these gray areas that aren’t quite war but are warlike,” he said. “I cannot, for the life of me, imagine what the obvious Republican-versus-Democratic answer looks like, with the divide between the two parties in trying to figure out a national-security strategy in this new age.

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