George Will: Democrats must practice ‘modesty’ to beat Trump in 2020

Conservative columnist and author George Will on Friday advised Democrats to practice the “politics of modesty” if they want to defeat President Trump in 2020.

“While today’s incumbent advertises himself as an ‘extremely stable genius’ and those who would replace him promise national transformation, attention should be paid to the granular details of presidential politics, which suggest that a politics of modesty might produce voting changes where they matter, and at least 270 electoral votes for a Democrat,” Will wrote in a column for The Washington Post.

The Democrat who beats out nearly two dozen other people for the party’s nomination will most likely be the person “favored by the party faction for whom government is more a practical than an ideological concern,” he continued.{mosads}

Will suggested that Democrats focus on securing the African American vote, which he predicted will be “the decisive Democratic faction.” Will cautioned that issues such as Supreme Court packing, impeaching Trump, abolishing the Electoral College “and other gesture-promises probably are distractions.” 

A 2016 Pew Research Center survey that found just 27 percent of African American Democrats identify as liberal, while a plurality describe themselves as moderate.

“The decisive voters might be those who crave not transformation but restoration — the recovery of national governance that is neither embarrassing nor exhausting,” Will wrote.

Will noted that Democrats have won the popular vote in six of seven presidential elections, urging the party to focus on “how to subtract states from Donald Trump’s roster.”

“Democrats must make amends with the 402 other counties that voted for Trump after voting for Obama at least once. This will require the Democrats’ progressive lions to lay down with the Democrats’ moderate lambs, a spectacle as biblical as it is inimical to progressives’ pride about their wokeness,” he wrote.

Will, who is promoting his latest book, “The Conservative Sensibility,” has emerged as a vocal critic of Trump and the modern Republican Party.

The longtime conservative left the GOP in June 2016, switching his voter registration to “unaffiliated.”

He said Thursday that young people consider the Republican Party “the dumb party” while warning that the GOP is “doing its very best to drive them away permanently.”

Last week, he called the GOP a “cult” of Trump.