James Carville suggests how to repair the Democratic Party

July 22, 2025 • 8:15 am

I’m a big fan of James Carville: I love that he’s a curmudgeon, speaks plainly, curses a lot, wears Louisiana State University tee-shirts (his school) during interviews, and opposes the “progressiveness” (aka wokeness) of the Democratic Party. (In case you don’t know, he’s a diehard Democrat and has helped many Democratic candidates with campaign strategies, most notably Bill Clinton in 1992.)

Now he’s not always right. In the last election, he first predicted that Kamala Harris would win, and, when she didn’t, gave a bunch of explanations about why her loss was inevitable (she was, he said, too woke). Still, I always listen to him, and he has a column in today’s NYT telling Democrats what they need to do to fight back against the odious Trumpian regime. Click the headline below or find his piece archived here.

His suggestions boil down to two things (headings are mine, indented prose is Carville’s), both of which, says Carville, can help Democrats recapture Congress at the midterms.

a.) Find a leader.

Constipated. Leaderless. Confused. A cracked-out clown car. Divided. These are the words I hear my fellow Democrats using to describe our party as of late. The truth is they’re not wrong: The Democratic Party is in shambles.

Zohran Mamdani’s victory in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary wasn’t an isolated event. It represents an undeniable fissure in our political soul. We are divided along generational lines: Candidates like Mr. Mamdani are impatient for an economic future that folks my age are skeptical can be delivered. We are divided along ideological lines: A party that is historically allegiant to the state of Israel is at odds with a growing faction that will not look past the abuses in Gaza and the West Bank. From Medicare for All purists to Affordable Care Act reformists, the list goes on and on.

The Democratic Party is steamrolling toward a civilized civil war. It’s necessary to have it. It’s even more necessary to delay it. The only thing that can save us now is an actual savior, because a new party can be delivered only by a person — see Barack Obama in 2008 and Bill Clinton in 1992. No matter how many podcasts or influencer streams our candidates go on, our new leader won’t arrive until the day after the midterms in November 2026, which marks the unofficial-yet-official beginning of the 2028 presidential primary contest. No new party or candidate has a chance for a breakthrough until that day.

That makes sense to me, and I spend what time I hve musing about this issue trying to find a good leader for our party. Well, it ain’t AOC, it’s ain’t Gavin Newsom, and it doesn’t look like my erstwhile favorite, Gretchen Whitmore. I once hoped that Mayor Pete could rise to the occasion, but he’s been pretty quiet (though he was effective in oofice) and doesn’t seem to aspire to a leadership role. If you have good candidates for someone to lead us out of the muck, put them below.

b.) Loudly call out Trump’s most palpable mistakes—mistakes that have angered even Republicans.  I’m not talking about his EOs on the sex binary or universities, which some Democrats approve of, but things that are just arrantly dumb:

Our midterm march starts with a simple phrase every candidate can blast on every screen and stage: We demand a repeal. A repeal of Mr. Trump’s spending law is the one word that should define the midterms. It is clear, forceful and full-throated. It must be slathered across every poster, every ad, every social media post from now until November 2026. That single word is our core message. Every Democrat can run on it, with outrage directed not at the president or a person but at this disastrous bill. And the reasons are countless, each one a venom-tipped political dagger.

. . . We demand a repeal to protect Medicaid. Mr. Trump’s law will slash roughly $1.1 trillion from health care programs, stripping coverage from an estimated 11.8 million people over the next decade.

. . . We demand a repeal to save the deficit. Not only will the new policy explode the national debt — the Congressional Budget Office estimates it could add $3.3 trillion over the next 10 years — but it will also take money away from the poorest 20 percent of Americans

. . . We demand a repeal to end the endless wars, because the bill boosts military spending to $1 trillion for the very first time. We demand a repeal for students who are losing loan protections or who may no longer be eligible for Pell Grants. We demand a repeal for working families, children and seniors who could go hungry because the bill is estimated to demolish SNAP by over $180 billion.

. . . We’ve never had a simpler, more unifying oppositional message. Soon it will no longer be possible to avoid a brawl between the factions ignited back in the 2016 Democratic presidential primaries. But for now, whether you’re the progressive Mr. Mamdani, the centrist former Representative Abigail Spanberger running for the Virginia governorship or even Elon Musk, we can all agree on one thing: We demand a repeal. Onward to the midterms.

Note that all of these things echo the famous phrase that Carville used when he ran the Clinton campaign, a phrase he repeated over and over again to energize the volunteers: “It’s the economy, stupid.” As Wikipedia notes,

In order to keep the [1992] campaign on message, Carville hung a sign in Bill Clinton’s Little Rock campaign headquarters that read:

  1. Change vs. more of the same.
  2. The economy, stupid.
  3. Don’t forget health care.

Although the sign was intended for an internal audience of campaign workers, the second phrase became a de facto slogan for the Clinton election campaign.

Now I don’t know if this new strategy will work. But it sure makes a lot more sense than whatever “strategy” the Democrats are using now, and in fact there doesn’t seem to be one. What we have is endless squabbling, with younger Democrats calling for older Democratic leaders to step down.  That’s a recipe for disaster, with the end result of Dems backing someone like Sanders or (heaven forbid) AOC.  Yes, those “candidates” may have charisma, but they’re not going to unite Democrats.

Of course I’m not a pundit with experience like Carville’s. These are just some random thoughts before I wander into downtown Reykjavik to find some coffee.

50 thoughts on “James Carville suggests how to repair the Democratic Party”

  1. To be a Democrat today:
    If you’re 50 you’re old. If you’re 60 you’re an old fart. If you’re 70 you’re senile. If you’re 80 you’re dead. No matter what you say. ‘Bring out your dead’: no, you didn’t ‘get better.’

    Ideology does not recognize wisdom. Only capital T Truth.
    So in my dotage I am a small-d democrat.

    1. I expected an “If you’re 80 you’re fit to be president.” as a closer there…

      1. Until the Democrats understand that they are the reason Trump is in power, they do not deserve to win. It’s not malignant straight white men, it’s everyone being turned off by their madness. If you dislike Trump as much as me, know who to blame.

  2. The trouble will Carville’s prescription for the Democrats, and it is true for many other’s as well, is that it presumes you can change a party positions like you change a suit of clothes. The driving force in the Democratic party right now appears to be the Progressive wing, and, even if they don’t fully agree, Dem lawmakers are in lock-step. End wars? Dems have loved them for twenty years. Would that include Ukraine? Unlikely. Rein in the debt? The uniparty is decidedly against that. Speak out against Trump’s policies? I wasn’t aware that they weren’t; it’s like white-noise now.

    Carville has become a gad-fly, and is calling for the Dems to be something they aren’t. It’s fairly clear that they can’t do that, and it is unclear that voters would be believe them if they did. Right now the biggest problem that the Dems have is Trump Derangement Syndrome. Anything he does must be bad. Therefore, they have to react to anything he does. It’s like they are chasing a red dot (I heard someone use that metaphor). Even if their base supports deportations of illegals, the Dems can’t let it slide because it’s Trump. Look at the Epstein thing. The Dems never even heard of Epstein until Trump said it wasn’t important. The Dems aren’t a party right now, they are a neurosis.

    1. “Carville has become a gad-fly, and is calling for the Dems to be something they aren’t.”

      Agreed. And is his support for Kamala was baffling and seriously undermined his credibility. She was and is the opposite of this transformational leader that he’s calling for.

    2. Trump didn’t originally say Epstein wasn’t important. He said in 2024 that he’d release the files. He brought it up when no one else was talking about it.

      1. Absolutely. But when he said it was important, Dem ignored it. When he said it wasn’t, they started jumping on it.

    3. +1

      If anyone is like me, they are finding themselves for the first time seriously reading the literature straight from the worst of the worst political régimes and “leaders” ever, and noticing that it all sounds … well, not like the ravening, incoherent nonsense from a version of the Warner Bros Tasmanian Devil I figured it to be. In fact, it is quite often progressive, and in love with “democracy” – which Lenin wrote over 100 times in State and Revolution as if he was in love with it.

      And, they are largely Gnostic, Hermetic religions.

      But I digress. 😁

  4. Trump’s bill shifts things. Biden’s was all new spending. An opinion on which is better or worse is 93% spin. Did Carville thrash Biden’s giant program?

    Here are the new spending items in the Trump bill…

    Border Security and Immigration Enforcement: $46.5 billion for Customs and Border Patrol to build the border wall, access roads, cameras, and sensors, plus $10 billion for state grants for immigration enforcement and deportation.

    Defense: Billions for shipbuilding, munitions, the Golden Dome missile defense system ($25 billion), and quality-of-life measures for service members.

    Infrastructure and Other Programs: $12.5 billion for air traffic control modernization, $200 million for the Kennedy Center, and $85 million for moving a space shuttle.

    Trump Savings Accounts: A one-time $1,000 federal deposit into tax-advantaged accounts for children born between 2025 and 2028, invested in stock index funds.

      1. But doesn’t the BBB just maintain the Trump tax cuts that were in place during the Biden term? Biden didn’t repeal them.

        1. I know. They were due to expire next year (I think). Trump just renewed them.

          Biden could have done more and cancelled them.

    2. Just a note on the $85M pork (barely even a gnat on the tuchas of the budget) to move a Shuttle from Washington DC (Smithsonian Uber Hazy Center at Dulles airport in Northern Va) to Houston, Tx: there are retired sSpace Shuttles on the Intrepid in New York City, Cape Kennedy in Florida, and this one in DC on the East Coast and one in Los Angeles on the west coast. One might argue that there be a better geographic distribution so that all Americans and visitors have access to seeing one and thus having one in Texas (at NASA’s Manned Spaceflight Center) would make some sense. But why take the one which is at the nation’s capital, a major draw both for American and international tourists? NYC is also a major destination for American and international tourists. Maybe the Cape Kennedy Shuttle could be moved from one NASA center to another….but in any case $85M….pure pork. I might guess that the choice of the Smithsonian shuttle is another case of ideological hatred of the federal government providing anything other that defense of the nation. You kind get off my lawn!

      1. I know he’s Jewish — who could miss the “Shapiro”? –, but he seems to be a reasonable center-left, common sense type, and he has also crushed it in a red district/state.

      2. Joe Lieberman. Came within 500 disputed ballots in Broward of being elected VP…his ticket won the popular vote. So, no.

        1. Joe was just fighting some of the traditional WASP country club gentry in those times, not the anti-israel left too. So, yes, I think.

  6. I do think that Carville is correct about having a leader. I’m not convinced that said leader is among those who have been identified: Whitmer, Newsom, Shapiro, Pritzker, (Wes) Moore, etc. Maybe. In any case, it’s hard to imaging galvanizing the party behind ideas or policies (fix healthcare, fix the deficit, stop the wokeness, extend the wokeness, etc.) Ideas are too broad and impersonal. None of those will work to restore the Democrats to power without a charismatic leader. A leader who can espouse ideas and project optimism is the most important factor. I don’t see one in the making, yet.

    It’s quite true that the Democrats are now split between the liberals and the progressives. It remains to be seen if they are even capable of putting those differences aside in order to unify behind a leader. I question whether they are sufficiently disciplined to do so. I worry, in particular, about the progressives. Can they put aside ideological purity long enough to win a national election? Again, we’ll see.

    1. Since there are more liberal Democrats than progressive Democrats, if the party were to split cancellation style (“We cannot sit on the same platform as people who hold so-called ‘moderate’ views: we feel unsafe”) then the Democrats might be a better party for it and stand a chance. Let the progressives have the Progressive Party, or Social Justice Party, or Queer Party, or what have you.

      1. More effective might be for the Democratic Party to take the initiative and purge the socialists if it has the numbers and control of the levers of the machine. Canada’s New Democratic Party did this to its far-left “Waffle” youth movement in 1972, which then tried to go it alone as an independent party as you suggest, and promptly folded when it failed to elect any MPs in the next national election. Whether the purge benefited the parent party is hard to say. The NDP has never elected a national government in the 90-odd years of its existence—its main stream is pretty much aligned with your Democratic Progressives as it is—but the purge did make selecting a leader and hammering together a platform, which is chiefly centred around whether or not to support the Liberal minority Governments its third-party existence pretty much guarantees, much easier without a faction trying to undermine its leader at every turn. Exemplifying the long march through the institutions, many expelled young Waffle-ites worked their way back into the NDP and came to influence its not very popular policies as they aged to this day.

        https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Waffle

        Maybe the DNC should dig out its own files from 1972 to study up on how it got rid of the McGovernites, another youth movement that put ideological infighting ahead of electability. Of course, I suppose the progs are studying too.

  7. Carville must be losing it if he thinks people are going to remember the Big Beautiful Bill (sic) enough to rally against it a year from now.

    1. Carville is a very smart political scientist. That said, I agree with the idea that a campaign based primarily on the repeal of an omnibus budget bill is wrongheaded. Too many ideas rolled into one instrument. You punch it in one spot and its advocates point to a list of unobjectionable provisions in it to ask how you can repeal milk subsidies for infants or cancer treatments for veterans. Your hook is too ambiguous. And unemotional for the average voter. Democrats need to stand FOR something the majority of the voting public wants. If a wing of the party can’t get behind a unified sale-able message, kick them to the curb, for now anyway. A period in the wilderness is often necessary for a person’s spiritual growth. That’s true in my life anyway.

      1. Sadly, the unified sale-able party message with the most impressive recent track-record is “Revenge!”.

        A plausibly better scenario is that both major parties split, and the pieces rearrange themselves into new coalitions. IMO, the reality-deniers in each party have more in common with each other than with the rest of their own party

          1. The two of you may be onto something. We need a realist party that values incremental steps, acceptable to the majority of the voting public, toward a better world. Might require a win-win instead of a win-lose culture at all levels of our government to pull it off.

  8. One of the great things about having Trump as president is that people DO criticize him.

  9. It would hugely help the Dems if they would talk plainly and stop using wonky words and phrases and slogans that only appeal to angry nutty Grievance Studies academics.

    It it okay to say “illegal immigrants” when referring to people who violate laws and are, in fact, residing in the US illegally. It is okay to refer to “homeless drug addicts” while compassionately discussing how best to help them. It is okay to say “prisoner” rather than “client of the correctional system”. No more silly made up words like “Bipoc” and “Latinx”. And for God’s sake, no more “pregnant men” or “women suffering prostate enlargement”.

    I shall make an analogy. As an undergrad took an interesting course in Marxist philosophy and history. I remember two fellow students. A and B, who were true believers. A was intelligent and interesting and a good explainer of his beliefs which, for the most part, were well thought out. It was interesting to engage with A whether or not I agreed with his slant on things. But B was a caricature of a mindless Marxist screwball. He babbled formulaic jingoistic nonsense about the “proletariat” and the “bourgeoisie” and “running dogs of imperialism” and what have you. Too many democrats don’t realize how much their speech these days resembles student B. Even when you agree on an issue, their language annoys.

  10. So, at the same time we have two forms of decadence. The supposedly “conservative” middle-American GOP becomes a personality cult around a NYC loud-mouth and charlatan so obvious that he was a joke in NYC for decades; and the Democratic Party disintegrates into woke posturing (e.g., a Dem mayoral candidate who proposes state groceries a la the USSR), ineffectiveness, and chaos. Could it be that both are symptoms of a general psychic breakdown? Maybe we are entering what James Howard Kunstler (before he himself went cuckoo) termed “the long emergency”: effects of climate change, depletion of water and other resources, massive migrations, and so on, all starting to undermine civilization on the whole and elicit general mental disintegration. Why, I’ve been feeling more and more disintegrated myself these days.

  11. If there is an election in 2028 (I am not convinced there will be for reasons that are another topic) I think the nominees have to be from the midwest. My choices are either JB Pritzker of Illinois or Andy Beshear of Kentucky. (I recognize that Pritzker is Jewish but he is of Ukrainian descent and very articulate, smart and wealthy) The VP should be Mallory McMorrow, an extraordinary talent. She is from Michigan and is running for US Senate. She would knock the socks off any GOP VP candidate, especially JD Vance. I recommend that readers Google her and watch some of her speeches. This is the one that originally drew my attention, but there are many others:

    I also think the Dems should hold their nominating convention as soon as possible, forget the costly and divisive primaries, and get the party leaders into the “smoke filled back room” and pick the candidates, so that the party would have a unified voice of leaders to get behind, and work hard every day until the election. Full disclosure: This idea is not original with me. One of my political science professors in college proposed the idea that the losing party should have its convention shortly after the election to have a unified opposition to the newly elected opponents. Obviously the current leadership of the Democratic Party (Schumer and Jeffries) don’t come near to being competent in that role.

    1. If you don’t think there will be a Presidential election in 2028 (presumably because Trump will abolish elections), I’ll bet you $100 there will be. Abolishing elections or running for a third term are things I don’t think that even Trump with his power is capable of doing.

      So how about it? Put your money where your mouth is? (I’m betting I don’t get a “yes”.)

      1. Canadians including me are taking your side of that bet, too, Jerry. $59.9 billion net new investment from Canada in America in the first five months of this year, an all-time high, in equities and debt instruments (including U.S. Treasury Bills. Yes, we’re helping our “enemy”’s Government finance its sovereign debt in the expectation of profit.) Our talented adventurers still want to move there, even if the stay-behinds tell the CBC they vomit at the prospect.

        https://financialpost.com/news/canadians-buying-u-s-stocks-record-pace

        All this is predicated on the United States remaining a stable and united, if perpetually excited, Constitutional republic. A good bet, I should think.

  12. At the time, I remember thinking that his prognostication about a Kamala Harris victory was not bc he believed it (as there was no reason to believe it), but rather that he did not want to make it worse for her.

    2. Correct. Just like a number of WEIT readers who called out Jerry (and others including myself) on his own blog for pointing out the obvious weaknesses of Kamala because they were afraid it would cause people to not vote for her. Asinine thinking. Support a loser for fear they might lose.

      1. Yes, I well remember that criticism: “Don’t say anything bad about Harris until after she wins. Then it’s okay.” I thought those claims were ridiculous.

        If people had heeded Harris’s deficiencies earlier, maybe we’d have a Democratic President now.

  14. I like the governor of Maryland, Wes Moore. He’s a problem solver. I heard him being interviewed and when asked about the midterms and who the Dems should run in 28 he said something to the effect of, anyone talking about 26 and 28 isn’t focusing on the problems of 2025. Search his ingenious solution to Maryland’s K-12 teacher shortage — offering let go federal workers with Bachelor’s earn teaching certificates online. I like his thinking.

  15. I’m going to suggest Dean Phillips — the one Democrat who thought that Biden should not automatically be coronated for a second term.

    Of course he was drummed out of the party.

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