The Democratic Party is going to lose the 2020 election and surrender whatever hope it has of becoming a majoritarian party if it tacks too far to the left, political strategist James Carville warned last week.
Nonsense, Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont responded this week, adding for good measure that Carville is a “political hack.”
These developments should inspire some strong flashbacks to 2016, when Hillary Clinton’s campaign aides were similarly dismissive of former President Bill Clinton after he warned correctly that their failure to connect with white and working-class voters would cost them the election.
“With all due respect,” Sanders said Wednesday during an appearance on CNN, “[Carville] is a political hack who said very terrible things when he was working for Clinton against Barack Obama.”
The 2020 Democratic primary front-runner added: “Look, we are taking on the establishment. This is no secret to anybody. … We’re taking on Trump, the Republican establishment, Carville, and the Democratic establishment.”
Carville, who supported failed 2020 Democratic primary candidate Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, has been on a bit of a tear recently about the direction of his party. According to the political strategist 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, Democratic candidates are killing themselves by allowing their platforms to be dictated by a “bunch of 25-year-olds shouting everyone down on Twitter.”
“In 2018,” Carville said in a recent interview with 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.”
And by “majoritarian party,” Carville means that Democrats need to think about more than just the White House. They need to think about taking control of the U.S. Senate.
“Sanders might get 280 electoral votes and win the presidency, and maybe we keep the House,” he said. “But there’s no chance in hell we’ll ever win the Senate with Sanders at the top of the party defining it for the public. Eighteen percent of the country elects more than half of our senators. That’s the deal, fair or not.”
He added: “So long as [Mitch] McConnell runs the Senate, it’s game over. There’s no chance we’ll change the courts, and nothing will happen, and he’ll just be sitting up there screaming in the microphone about the revolution. The purpose of a political party is to acquire power. All right? Without power, nothing matters.”
The way forward, Carville argued, is to remain disciplined and focus on a message that appeals to a broad audience, not just niche subgroups on social media.
Democrats can win by “framing, repeating, and delivering a coherent, meaningful message that is relevant to people’s lives and having the political skill not to be sucked into every rabbit hole that somebody puts in front of you,” Carville said.
He added: “Most of the people aren’t into all this distracting shit about open borders and letting prisoners vote. 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.”
Look, you can say a lot of things about Carville. Sanders is not even necessarily wrong when he calls him a “political hack” (Carville himself does not object to the label). But Carville is not wrong when he warns that a tack too hard in either direction will thwart any attempt by the Democrats to become a majoritarian party. He is also not wrong when he says the Democrats’ best chance to unseat Trump in 2020 is to appeal to the general electorate with a simple, no-frills argument that says they are better on healthcare, jobs, and the economy than the Republican Party. This is Politics 101.
Sanders does not have to like Carville. But he dismisses the strategist’s warnings at his own peril. Sure, the 1992 presidential election was a long time ago. But like Bill Clinton, whose warnings were similarly dismissed in 2016 by cocksure Democratic campaign aides, Carville knows a little something about defeating an incumbent Republican president.
