Biden went on to assert that the prime minister’s triumph would change public perceptions regarding Trump’s odds of re-election. “You’re also going to see people saying, ‘My God, Boris Johnson, who is kind of a physical and emotional clone of the president, is able to win,'” he said.

Biden has advanced a more moderate political ideology throughout the Democratic primary, criticizing sweeping policy proposals from the field’s leading progressive contenders, Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.

The vast majority of the party and the broader electorate, Biden has claimed, are not as liberal as those candidates would suggest, and instead are seeking a sense of national unity in a post-Trump era and a restoration of America’s role on the world stage.

Some of Biden’s rivals have slammed his appeals for bipartisanship as naive and outdated given the rancor of Washington and levels of animosity between Democratic and Republican lawmakers. But Biden pushed back against that critique Thursday, charging that “there’s not a single candidate running who has ever passed a major piece of legislation” in Congress.

Biden insisted that while his competitors employ a “completely different style,” he never questions others’ motives and always attempts to find common ground. “Presidents are supposed to be able to persuade and work something out,” he said, adding that he thinks he has “been relatively good at doing that.”