From the sound of things, Vice President Joseph Biden is still struggling with a decision on whether to enter the race for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination and challenge the faltering Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Still mourning the death of his 46-year-old son Beau from brain cancer, Biden told “Late Show” host Stephen Colbert Thursday night that any serious candidate would have to give “110 percent of themselves” to enter the race at this late date -- and that “I’d be lying if I said I knew I was there.”

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Biden may ultimately decide he does have the “fire in his belly” to make a third and final bid for his party’s nomination against Clinton and Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who has overtaken Clinton in the polls in Iowa and New Hampshire.

Waiting until late September or early October to see if former Secretary of State Clinton’s campaign implodes or Sanders’ falters is a big risk for any potential candidate. It’s not just because of the obvious challenges of having to assemble a strong national campaign organization on the fly or raise hundreds of millions of dollars to mount an effective media strategy.

One of the more important– albeit mundane and dreary – tasks in the early going is to get a candidate’s name on the ballot for the early, critical primary races in New Hampshire, South Carolina and a handful of other southern states.

A basic political fact is that candidates can give the best speeches and run the cleverest ads, but if they miss a deadline for filing, they can miss out on a passel of delegates who will ultimately help choose their party’s nominee. The late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts learned that lesson the hard way when he challenged Democratic President Jimmy Carter for their party’s nomination in 1980.

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“Putting aside the question of how serious Hillary’s problems are . . . there are serious structural problems that will, very shortly, keep anyone who is not already in this race from getting in,” Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution, wrote on a blog last week.

“Conventional wisdom says a candidate has to get in early in order to raise money. That’s true for unknowns but any of the nationally recognized candidates . . . could, thanks to the Internet, raise a fair amount of money pretty quickly,” she added. “The more serious problem is that presidential nominees these days get elected in public primaries and public primaries have filing deadlines.”