Vice President Joe Biden said Thursday that defeated Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton never really figured out why she was running .

"I don't think she ever really figured it out… And by the way, I think it was really hard for her to decide to run," Biden told the Los Angeles Times, in a wide-ranging interview .

The closest she came to having a concrete rationale, Biden says, is that she felt as a woman she had an obligation to run .

"She thought she had no choice but to run… That, as the first woman who had an opportunity to win the presidency, I think it was a real burden on her," Biden said, adding that the former secretary of state saw the run as a way to open up "a whole range of new vistas to women."

Clinton's struggles with the white working class , culminating in her shock losses in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, have led some to wonder if Biden, long noted for his working and middle class appeal, would have fared better against Donald Trump, now president-elect. Biden has previously said he regrets not running in 2016 "every day" and has already refused to rule out running in 2020, even declaring he would , before saying the remark was a joke.

In the interview with the Times, Biden lamented that there's "a bit of elitism that's crept" into Democratic Party thinking.

"I believe that we were not letting an awful lot of people — high school-educated, mostly Caucasian, but also people of color — know that we understood their problems," Biden said of the past year's election approach.