Joe Biden has told an audience in the US he had planned to run for US president and that he “could have won.” Picture: AP/Susan Walsh

“What happened was that this was the first campaign that I can recall where my party did not talk about what it always stood for — and that was how to maintain a burgeoning middle class,” Biden told an audience at the University of Pennsylvania on Thursday, CNN reported.

Joe Biden has long been a popular political figure in the US. Picture: Monica Schipper/Getty ImagesSource:Getty Images

“You didn’t hear a single solitary sentence in the last campaign about that guy working on the assembly line making $60,000 bucks a year and a wife making $32,000 as a hostess in a restaurant,” he continued. “And they are making $90,000 and they have two kids and they can’t make it and they are scared, they are frightened.”

Mr Biden’s remarks came at the launch event for the Penn Biden Centre for Diplomacy and Global Engagement — his main post-vice presidency gig, reports the New York Post.

Joe Biden said Hillary Clinton’s inability to connect with the American working class cost her the election. Picture: AP/Charles DharapakSource:News Limited

Mr Biden said last week he thinks he had a good shot at becoming the Democrats’ presidential candidate.

“I had planned on running for president and although it would have been a very difficult primary, I think I could have won,” Biden told a Colgate University crowd last Friday. “I don’t know, maybe not. But I thought I could have won.”

“I had a lot of data and I was fairly confident that if I were the Democratic Party’s nominee, I had a better-than-even chance of being president,” he added. “But do I regret not being president? Yes. I was the best qualified.”

Joe Biden says he regrets not running for president. Picture: Alex Wong/Getty Images/AFPSource:AFP

This story was originally appeared in the New York Post and is reprinted with permission.