Political strategist James Carville has once again made himself unpopular in his own party for saying what few Democrats are willing to admit.
The Democratic Party will become a permanent minority so long as it runs on ultra-liberal, “woke” politics, he said this week. Carville may have a point.
Virginia Democrats suffered a bloodbath this week in the Nov. 2 elections, losing the governor’s race, the lieutenant governor’s race, the attorney general race, and even the Virginia House of Delegates.
Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, meanwhile, barely maintained his seat after a surprisingly strong showing from Republican Jack Ciattarelli. In Minneapolis, a measure to abolish the police was defeated handily, 56% to 44%. In Buffalo, New York, socialist mayoral candidate India Walton, who secured the endorsement of Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, lost by double digits to a write-in candidate — current Democratic Mayor Byron Brown.
There were a few bright spots for Democrats, but not enough to cover up the fact it has been an objectively terrible week for them at the polls. For Carville, who in 1992 helped break up the Republican Party’s 12-year hold on the White House, leading Bill Clinton to victory over an incumbent president who oversaw a relatively strong economy and a successful war, Democrats have no one to blame but themselves. Their inexplicably stupid embrace of “woke” and ultra-racialist politics is killing them with voters, he argues.
“What went wrong is just stupid wokeness,” Carville said this week in an interview with PBS NewsHour’s Judy Woodruff. “Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island. Look at Buffalo. Look at Minneapolis. Even look at Seattle, Washington. I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that — people see that.”
He added, “It’s just really — has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something. They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”
Carville noted Republican Virginia Gov.-elect Glenn Youngkin never even ran ads against President Joe Biden. The Republican candidate merely sat back and allowed Democrats to “pull the pin and watch the grenade go off.”
“We got to change this and not be about changing dictionaries and change laws,” Carville said. “These faculty lounge people that sit around mulling about I don’t know what. … They’re not working.”
Give the man credit where it’s due. This isn’t just Monday morning quarterbacking. Carville has spent the past few years begging and pleading with Democrats to act normal.
In 2020, he claimed the Democratic Party’s lurch to the hard-left was undoing its gains from the previous election cycle.
“In 2018,” Carville told Vox, “Democrats recruited really strong candidates, really qualified candidates. … And you know what happened? We f***ing won. We didn’t get distracted. We didn’t get deflected.”
But now, he continued, “we have candidates on the debate stage talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. They’re talking about doing away with nuclear energy and fracking. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that or if there are good arguments — talking about that is not how you win a national election. It’s not how you become a majoritarian party.”
“Most of the people aren’t into all this distracting s*** about open borders and letting prisoners vote,” Carville said, reiterating for the umpteenth time that Democrats need to focus on a simple, no-frills message that says they are better on healthcare, jobs, and the economy than the Republican Party. “They don’t care. They have lives to lead. They have kids. They have parents that are sick. That’s what we have to talk about. That’s all we should talk about.”
He said this in 2020, when Biden won the presidency on the simple message that he was the better, and normal, candidate for healthcare, the pandemic, and the economy.
Now, however, Biden thinks he’s the second coming of FDR and LBJ. This has not only killed the president in the polls, but it has also done nothing to help Democrats nationwide, including in Virginia where Biden even campaigned for failed Democratic gubernatorial candidate Terry McAuliffe.
Democrats don’t have to like Carville. They just have to listen to him. He may know what he’s talking about. For the sake of conservatism, I hope Democrats continue to ignore Carville’s warnings.
