A quick thought.
Where would the other candidates be right now if Biden wasn't in the race?
He's currently the front runner, but it wasn't always inevitable that he was going to run.
There's a lot of speculation of where Sanders or Warren would be without the other, with the assumption that most of one of their voters would go to the other.
There's also a lot of people specifically not happy with Biden.
I wonder if Biden isn't perhaps drawing up more support for the lower tier candidates simply by being in the race than there would be if he weren't?
He's also a good target for some of those lower tier candidates as well. Hits on Biden seem to get more attention, and last longer in the memory than say, Castro and O'Rourke's little feud.
I have no answers, it was just an interesting thought. Right now he seems to be something of an inevitability. If not for democratic candidate, then the feeling that he was always supposed to be in this race given his frontrunner status, and all the leadup to him actually announcing. (There were polls of where he would stand in the race before he actually announced being in the race.)
But a year or two ago, it was still a question hanging in the air that could have swung either way. Nobody knew if Biden would run, or even wanted to run.