Read: Joe Biden wants everyone to lower their expectations

Of course, Biden has to make it through the primaries, and so far he’s been the heavy without much of the actual weight. (Candidates have continued announcing even in the two weeks since Biden entered the race.) Some are convinced that his campaign will eventually collapse beneath new blunders or voters will become exhausted after attacks on a record that includes more votes and more speeches than Clinton ever had to her name. His recent boost in the polls is bigger than his own team expected, and aides on other campaigns admit that Biden’s media attention has been overwhelming. But none of that has translated into huge or passionate crowds.

“Biden possesses many of the downsides of Clinton’s attributes with fewer of the upsides,” a former Clinton aide told me. They noted that while Biden has tried to display a show of force in the first phase of his candidacy, he hasn’t locked up as many of the big donors as Clinton did by this time in her own campaign, nor does he have as long a list of endorsements. “Clinton had several trappings of an establishment candidacy, but she at least got the most out of those factors,” the aide said. “Whereas Biden is going to be vulnerable to many of the same criticisms without that.”

Will that matter to voters this time around?

Biden’s campaign might be a 2016 what-if. He’s a candidate running to take down Trump with a long résumé, a promise of steady leadership, and a middle-of-the-road Democratic policy agenda. But this cycle, the candidate is not battling a public image poisoned by a 25-year conservative conspiracy complex. As Clinton herself put it in an appearance in Washington a few weeks ago, “When you get attacked, or there are false stories about you, even your supporters get nervous.”

Like Clinton in 2016, Biden has cornered the punditry market on “electability,” and his campaign is also a redo. Of the 21 Democrats so far seeking the nomination, Biden is the only one who’s flamed out in two previous attempts, not to mention that he stopped just short of running in 1992, 2004, and 2016. (And unlike Bernie Sanders, the other repeat candidate, Biden received just 1 percent of the vote in Iowa in 2008 and dropped out, while Sanders hit over 49 percent in Iowa and went on to win 22 more states.)

Read: Trump’s obsession with Joe Biden takes a new turn

Trump attacked Clinton not just as the evil schemer with the frozen smile, but also as the embodiment of the entire failed Washington system. “Hillary, I'd just ask you this,” Trump said during their first debate in September 2016. “You've been doing this for 30 years. Why are you just thinking about these solutions right now?” Moments like that are why Miller says Biden is the candidate he’d most like to see Trump face.