Conservative columnist George Will says he’s voting for Biden

Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will confirmed Tuesday that he would vote for former Vice President Joe Biden, his first vote for a Democrat for president.

In an interview with USA Today Washington bureau chief Susan Page for the Aspen Institute, Will went further than his 2016 non-endorsement of President Trump and said that he would vote for Biden, the presumptive Democratic nominee. Will warned against Trump’s nomination in 2016 but stopped short of endorsing his Democratic opponent, Hillary Clinton, at the time.

“Who do you plan to vote for in November?” Page asked the columnist via Zoom.

“Biden,” Will replied immediately.

“Have you voted for a Democrat before?” she continued.

“Never,” Will said, adding, “I’ve nothing against Democrats. But I’ve never had the occasion to vote for one.”

While the Washington Post columnist has never endorsed a Democrat for office at the presidential level, his decision to support Biden is not surprising; in 2018, Will came out in favor of voters ousting Republican lawmakers in the House and Senate, calling for the number of GOP elected officials to be “substantially reduced.”

“The principle: The congressional Republican caucuses must be substantially reduced. So substantially that their remnants, reduced to minorities, will be stripped of the Constitution’s Article I powers that they have been too invertebrate to use against the current wielder of Article II powers,” Will wrote for the Post in June 2018. “They will then have leisure time to wonder why they worked so hard to achieve membership in a legislature whose unexercised muscles have atrophied because of people like them.”

“The Republican-controlled Congress, which waited for Trump to undo by unilateral decree the border folly they could have prevented by actually legislating, is an advertisement for the unimportance of Republican control,” he added at the time.

Will has opposed Trump from the beginning of the latter’s political career and in 2015 warned that Trump securing the Republican nomination could spell the doom of the GOP.

“One hundred and four years of history is in the balance. If Trump is the Republican nominee in 2016, there might not be a conservative party in 2020 either,” he said at the time.

Updated on July 22 at 9:45 a.m.