Why Democrats should abandon coercive progressivism

The first rule of Pundit Club is: election results always mean what your political prejudices want them to mean. Since I am a stickler for rules, and since everyone else is getting in on it, here is my tuppence-worth on what the results so far tell us about the US presidential election.

If Joe Biden is the next President of the United States, it is a clear rebuke of the Trump White House years. The last time a Democrat presidential candidate won Arizona was Bill Clinton in 1996, so flipping the state and its 11 electoral votes is a totemic moment for Biden. The same will be the case if Georgia, which hasn’t backed a Democrat for the White House since Clinton in 1992, ends up in the Biden column. The federal government’s handling of Covid-19 and in particular Donald Trump’s lack of leadership for much of the pandemic will have played its part, and while the amateur demographers on the left and right already have their explanations, there is no taking Biden’s achievement from him: he has convinced at least one red-on-the-cusp-of-purple state to go all the way blue.