Political strategist and commentator James Carville blamed Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss on her party’s failure to distance itself from “woke era” politics.
Democrats endured a difficult string of defeats over the past few days, with Donald Trump securing a second term. Meanwhile, the GOP regained control of the Senate and now appears poised for a majority in the House of Representatives. Many from both sides of the aisle have since engaged in postmortems of Harris’ campaign, attempting to put their finger on the factors that led to this shift.
Peter Loge, former senior adviser to Barack Obama, told Newsweek that America had entered the “I knew it all along” phase of “post-campaign punditry.”
During the most recent episode of his Politics War Room podcast, Carville outlined the “big, big mistakes” he believed the Democratic Party had made in the 2024 presidential election.
Carville said what “killed” the Democrats in these elections was a “sense of dishonor” among the electorate, part of which, he said, “was the unfortunate events of what I would refer to as the woke era.”
“We got beyond it,” he said. “But the image stuck in people’s minds that the Democrats wanted to defund the police, wanted to empty prisons…it created a sense of dishonor.”
Carville also cited the party’s initial support for President Joe Biden to run for reelection and the process of choosing another candidate following his withdrawal in July.
“By Biden staying in so late, we didn’t have any process,” Carville said. “We had all of this unused [talent] sitting on the sideline.”
Carville was remarking on Harris’s near-immediate ascendance to the top of the party’s ticket, bypassing the competitive nomination process that candidates traditionally have to undertake. This decision, criticized by some as undemocratic, has been touted by others as contributing to the vice president’s eventual defeat.
“If we’d had some kind of an open process, it would have been much better,” Carville added. “It could have been worse, but it could have been much better.”
Carville, who coined the axiom, “It’s the economy, stupid,” ahead of Bill Clinton‘s victory in the 1992 election, also cited inflation as an additional “sign of dishonor” for voters.
Despite occasionally voicing disapproval at elements of her strategy, Carville had been a crusader for Harris throughout the election and was one of the most prominent voices forecasting her win.
In his October 23 op-ed for The New York Times, “Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win,” Carville wrote: “America, it will all be OK. Ms. Harris will be elected the next president of the United States. Of this, I am certain.”
As evidence, Carville cited the “losing streak” the Republican Party, including Trump, had endured since 2018, Harris’s fundraising abilities, and his own political instinct—“It’s just a feeling.”
Among the other sayings employed by Carville during Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign was that elections were won and lost on the promise of “change vs. more of the same.” He said the Harris team had failed to pay attention to this “basic fundamental of politics.”
“Change is what wins elections,” Carville said before appearing to cite a recent NBC News poll finding that 65 percent of registered voters viewed the country as “on the wrong track.”
“In a 65 percent wrong-track country, we were offering people the same track,” Carville said.
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