Biden: Clinton Never 'Figured it Out' in Explaining Her Run for President

— -- Vice President Joe Biden suggested in an interview that former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was unable to clearly communicate why she ran for the nation's highest office.

“I don’t think she ever really figured it out,” Biden told the Los Angeles Times. “And by the way, I think it was really hard for her to decide to run.”

Clinton didn't run out of raw ambition or a need to move back to the White House, Biden said in the story published Thursday.

Rather, the outgoing vice president said he think she ran out of a sense of duty and a desire to open up "a whole range of new vistas for women" as the nation's first woman president.

“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.

He recalled sensing a lack of enthusiasm at Clinton rallies, including one in northern Virginia.

“You didn’t see any Hillary signs,” Biden said in the interview. “Every time I talked about Hillary they listened. But …”

Biden also commented on the rise of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders -- Clinton's rival in the Democratic primaries -- to become a populist hero. He drew a distinction between what he called President Obama’s middle-class agenda and Sanders’ anti-Wall Street focus.

“I like Bernie,” Biden said. “But I don’t think 500 billionaires caused all our problems.”

He said it first occurred to him that Donald Trump might win the election when he watched footage of the Republican candidate at a rally in October in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, not far from Biden's childhood home.

He recalled thinking, “'Son of a gun. We may lose this election.'” Trump voters, he said, are “all the people I grew up with. They’re their kids. And they’re not racist. They’re not sexist. But we didn’t talk to them.”

Biden made similar comments during an interview with CNN earlier this month, when he said, “These are good people, man. These aren’t racists, these aren’t sexists.”

ABC's John Verhovek contributed to this article.