Democratic strategist James Carville is a modern-day Cassandra, an all-seeing prophet doomed to be ignored by everyone, including sometimes even himself.
Vice President Kamala Harris was defeated last week in the 2024 election, losing all seven swing states, the Electoral College, and likely the popular vote to President-elect Donald Trump.
Adding insult to injury, the Republican Party also retook the Senate and is on track to maintain control of the House.
Unfortunately for Carville, Harris’s defeat came not long after he had predicted she would become the 47th president of the United States. He said he was “certain” of her victory.
Whoops.
Worse than getting it wrong, however, is Carville — of all people! — should have seen this coming. For years, the irascible Cajun has stood practically alone among liberal strategists, warning repeatedly that a Democratic Party unwilling to loosen its embrace of off-putting progressive pieties and ultra-left-wing culture is a Democratic Party doomed to electoral failure.
“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” in Democratic campaign culture, Carville warned in March after he had noticed data showing the party’s loss of black male voters. “Don’t drink beer, don’t watch football, don’t eat hamburgers, this is not good for you. The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’”
He added, “If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: ‘Well, 48% of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?’”
Carville caught heat from fellow liberals, many of whom denounced his remarks as “unconscionable” and retrogressive.
For example, the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart tried to corner the longtime Democratic strategist over his remarks, using the weasely “some people say” formulation of criticism.
“There are a lot of people for whom saying that there are ‘too many preachy females’ might sound like you’re a 20th-century man in a 21st-century country that has changed,” Capehart said to applause.
Carville was nonplussed.
“There are too many preachy females in Democratic campaign culture,” he reasserted. “We come across to people as judgmental. That’s not good. At all.”
“If the proof is not in the pudding, look at the male number who identify as Democrats,” he added.
To his point, Trump won the male vote last week by 55%.
Even earlier, in 2020, Carville warned the party was becoming too left-wing and self-satisfied to appeal to the general electorate. Referring to it as the “cultural disconnect” between Democrats and voters, he explained:
“I want to give you an example of the problem here. A few weeks ago, Binyamin Appelbaum, an economics writer for the New York Times, posted a snarky tweet about how LSU canceled classes for the National Championship game. And then he said, do the ‘Warren/Sanders free public college proposals include LSU, or would it only apply to actual schools?’”
“You know how f***ing patronizing that is to people in the South or in the middle of the country? First, LSU has an unusually high graduation rate, but that’s not the point. It’s the g**damn smugness. This is from a guy who lives in New York and serves on the Times editorial board and there’s not a single person he knows that doesn’t pat him on the back for that kind of tweet. He’s so f***ing smart.”
“Appelbaum doesn’t speak for the Democratic Party, but he does represent the urbanist mindset. We can’t win the Senate by looking down at people. The Democratic Party has to drive a narrative that doesn’t give off vapors that we’re smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant.”
He should have stuck with his gut in 2024.
On Election Day, the Democratic Party performed about as poorly as Carville had predicted it would if it ignored its glaring “cultural disconnect” problem.
Harris won voters with bachelor’s or advanced degrees, including nearly 60% of white female college graduates, according to exit polling data. Harris won female voters aged 18 to 29 and a slightly smaller portion of women aged 65 years and older. The vice president won voters earning $200,000 or greater. She won voters who answered “none” as their religious affiliation. She won voters who say they have no children younger than 18 living at home. She won female voters who don’t have any children. She won unmarried voters (of this group, she won nearly 60% of unmarried female voters). Harris also won three-quarters of voters who said abortion was the No. 1 issue in the election.
In other words, the Democratic Party has become precisely what Carville feared: an unappealing, exclusionary NPR-style club for the wealthy, the smug, the plentifully educated, and, well, “preachy women.”
Trump, meanwhile, won the male vote, the rural vote, the military vote (current and veteran), the noncollege-educated vote, the religious vote, especially Catholics and Protestants, the married vote, the children-still-living-at-home vote, and the portion of the electorate that makes between $30,000 and $100,000 per year.
Trump also won sizable portions of the voting blocs that went to Harris. This is in addition to the fact the Trump campaign made a concerted effort during the election to woo non-Republicans and non-conservative political figures and groups, including libertarians, former Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Robert F. Kenedy Jr., and even Jill Stein supporters.
More plainly, Trump did what Carville had been begging his party to do: build a political coalition.
“There’s a word a lot of people hate that I love: politics,” he said in 2020. “It means building coalitions to win elections. It means sometimes having to sit back and listen to what people think and framing your message accordingly.”
Last week, having seen Harris go down in flames even after predicting she’d win, Carville appeared dejected.
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“I’m sure I’ll come up with something to make me feel good again,” he said. “But right now, today, it’s hard. I’ll be honest with you.”
He should have listened to his own warnings. The landing on Election Day would have been softer.
Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner, National Review, and The Hill. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
