The 2020 presidential race is not just about policy. It’s also about power. Many Democratic candidates, from Senator Bernie Sanders to Senator Elizabeth Warren to Mayor Pete Buttigieg, have sketched out how they would overcome Republican efforts to structurally tilt American democracy in conservatives’ favor. Joe Biden, the current frontrunner, has not. His campaign is built around the idea that Republicans should be seen as work colleagues, not political opponents—and that once President Donald Trump leaves office, Biden will unleash his superpower to convince them to come to the negotiating table.

“The thing that will fundamentally change things is with Donald Trump out of the White House,” he told reporters last month in New Hampshire. “Not a joke. You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends.”

Every Democratic contender has to answer how they’ll get anything done with Congress so deeply divided along ideological lines, especially given the difficult of winning the Senate in 2020. But of all the answers so far, Biden’s may be the most unrealistic.

When it comes to Donald Trump himself, Biden is relatively unsparing in his criticism. He described the president as an “existential threat” to the United States in an interview this week. When Biden announced his presidential bid this spring, he pointed to Trump’s remark that there were “very fine people” among the white nationalists at Charlottesville as a personal turning point. “With those words, the president of the United States assigned a moral equivalence between those spreading hate and those with the courage to stand against it,” he said. “And in that moment, I knew the threat to this nation was unlike any I had ever seen in my lifetime.”

When it comes to the political party that keeps Trump in power, however, Biden is far more gracious. It’s become a recurring theme for the former vice president to praise Republicans on the campaign trail. Though he faced criticism for his remark in New Hampshire, he picked up the theme again this week.