Would party fatigue have impacted Biden were he the nominee?

[uti2]

Yes. He probably would've won by roughly the same percentage, but just barely gotten over the line in The Rust Belt to hold the EV up.

Even in 1988 was party fatigue a factor. It just so happened that the insider floor was much higher, the nation less polarized, and the Jackson/Gore split allowed a robot to the top. [aka 2016 if Jeb! had somehow won]

@Ginny: Truman didn't hold his own, Dewey just happened to sabotage himself thinking it was in the bag. If Dewey had bothered to campaign like he did in '44, he would've flipped California, taken the whole Manufacturing Belt and won the election.

To be fair, Rubio is a better comparison for Dukakis (& Dewey). They were superficial candidates that were running on 'electability' (their arguments were that they were qualified because of superficial attributes) and had similar immigrant background narratives. Both were seen as shoo-ins for entirely superficial reasons as well. Not to mention the 'robotic' factor.

[uti2]

Yes, but he could have overcome it against someone like Trump.  Against most Republicans, though, no Democrat could have won.

Let's look at what happened. Romney got destroyed by Obama, Kerry came far closer to winning electorally than Romney ever did, and Gore won the popular vote in 2000, and barely 'lost' the EV.

One party constantly underperforms the general trend.

The only weakness Dems have is when they court republicans instead of their own base which is what Gore & Hillary tried to do. It is ironic, because Hillary only adopted that GOP strategy in the context of Trump, she changed from her previous strategy of running an Obama '12-esque campaign.

[uti2]

It was going to be a challenge for whatever Democrat, and parties rarely win three times in a row. The fundamentals of the election favored Trump-in fact based on just the fundamentals Clinton did better than she should have. However it wasn't an insurmountable obstacle and the Democrats could have done well regardless if they had a better candidate and campaign(Bush 1988 won in a landslide for example).

Dems outperformed the fundamentals in 2000 and 2004, while the GOP underperformed in 2008 and 2012.

Bush's margin of victory was 120k votes in OH, similar to Trump's 80k votes in the rustbelt.