The fierce competition for votes in states like Arizona and Georgia is actually a sign the country is less divided, conservative columnist George Will said today during an interview at the !Spark Disruptor Conference. Moreover, Republicans got some good news as voters in blue states rejected proposals to raise taxes on targeted groups like the wealthy.
“Competition is a good thing, it purifies and elevates,” Will said.
Meanwhile, the American mosaic keeps changing subtly. He pointed to red states such as Arizona, Texas and Georgia that have become purple, and Virginia that has turned blue. “So, the more America that is subject to competition, the better off that we are going to be. It is a wholesome development,” he said.
Will said Americans became exhausted by the politics of the past four years of the Trump era and wanted relief. “If presidents are not careful, and this president is not a careful man, they can wear out their welcome fairly fast, and that’s why Mr. Biden won the popular vote,” he said.
Biden did so by a substantial margin, he noted. Republican presidential candidates have lost the popular vote in seven of the past eight elections, which means the political market is trying to tell us something, Will continued. The Trump coalition—rural small town, religious, elderly, non-college educated whites—is a steadily shrinking percentage of the electorate.
In fact, it was 2.6% smaller in 2020 than it was in 2016. “The Trump strategy has been to squeeze an ever-larger portion of an ever-smaller slice of the electorate and that is not a recipe for long-term success, and that’s at the presidential level,” Will said.
Will posited that had it not been for the massive turnout in Georgia and the runoff on Jan. 5 for that state's two U.S. Senate seats that could dictate with party controls the Senate, Republicans in office would be speaking out against the president digging in his heels and resisting the transition. “They are walking on eggshells and minding their language, whereas if some of them did not have this election, they would tell the president to please pack up and depart.”
Despite losing the presidency, Republicans received a lot of good news in last week's election, Will said. They did very well among certain groups of Hispanic voters, specifically Cuban-Americans in south Florida.
On the tax front, signs are surfacing that even liberal voters don't see raising taxes as the answer to all their problems. Will noted that in California, as blue as any state in the nation, voters nixed a referendum to increase taxes on business and commercial properties. Illinois, another blue state, rejected a referendum to plug its gaping budget deficit by raising taxes on the rich.
“So, the country seems to remain a kind of center-right country,” he said.
Biden won the presidency, but Democrats had a terrible night in the House, Senate and many state legislative races, Will continued. "And now they are at one another's throat as to who is to blame." According to some published reports, Rep. Ocasio-Cortez has said the backlash from members of her own party is causing her to consider a new career.
Will noted that the anticipated Democratic decade of governance was predicated on there being a blue wave in a Census year. “That is the blue wave would sweep in an enormous number of state legislators who would then redistrict on the basis of the 2020 Census that would favor the Democrats. But that blue wave did not materialize.”
Former attorney general Eric Holder, he said, raised a ton of money but failed in an attempt to flip states' legislative assemblies.
Will also noted that Virginia Rep. Abigail Spanberger, who narrowly won her House seat in Virginia, vented to the Democratic caucus for associating her with defunding the police and told them not to use the word "Socialism" because the American people don’t like it. “It’s not what we are about in this country and they don’t want an election to be a referendum on things like that.”
“It seems to me the really depressed people today are the AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez). progressive caucus-types who saw their future turn to ashes on election night,” Will said.