Transcript: James Carville on Why Trump Won—and What Dems Must Do Now

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 26 episode of the
Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

As Democrats sift through the wreckage left behind by Donald Trump’s victory, it’s now beyond question that the party needs a major rebuilding effort with working-class voters. A new analysis from The New York Times finds that the problem has been numerous cycles in the making. From 2012 to 2024, Republicans enjoyed a 13-point swing among working-class whites and a 37-point swing among working-class nonwhites. Those are some pretty sobering numbers. Today, we’re fortunate to be talking to James Carville about what went wrong and where Democrats go next. Thanks for coming back on, James.

James Carville: Thank you, Greg. Delighted to be here.

Sargent: Clearly just about every group moved away from Democrats in this election, though there are indications that in the states that Kamala Harris’s campaign contested with Senate races, the shift was less pronounced. The movements among working-class voters in particular is alarming stuff. What’s your immediate reaction to all of it?

Carville: Well, I’d say at some level disappointment; at another level, it was predictable. You could see it. The problem is particularly acute among males. I’ve thought that for a long time. And also, much of the problem is cultural. The Democrats’ gleeful embrace of what I call cultural, culture, an almost ill-defined thing, but we all understand what it is, just was more alienating to people than we could imagine, and particularly alienating to people in the middle of the country.

Sargent: Well, I want to come back to that in a bit. A big shift among young and nonwhite voters—they back Trump in numbers that would have been hard to imagine only a few years ago. Harris only won voters aged 18 to 29 by 54 to 43 percent. Harris only beat Trump among Latinos by maybe five points or 10 points, depending on the estimate. I got to think with young voters and to some degree Latino voters, part of the problem here was communication. And I want to ask you about that. What are you thinking right now about what the party needs to do to improve its ability to reach these voters? You mentioned that a lot of this is cultural, and a lot of this has to do with males. Young males are a problem for the Democratic Party, but again, lot of that’s communication. What are you thinking right now about all this?

Carville: First of all, with young voters, part of it is communication, but part of it is real. So for a person, an older person, say me, who is a net saver, who owns a house, doesn’t have a mortgage, doesn’t have to pay insurance, has money in the stock market, this is a great economy. But if I tell somebody 26 how great it is, they said, Man, what are you talking about? I no chance that I can buy a house with these interest rates. Every time I look, the tuition somewhere is $70,000 a year or whatever. Every time I even think about buying insurance on everything, I’m totally screwed. And it’s almost the more that you talk about it, the worse it gets.

These people don’t think their economy for them is very good. You can understand how it is. Rents have gone through the roof. And almost when you talk about it, it drives them further away. It’s supposed to that you could do any number of policies that are universally popular, that young people would embrace, that wouldn’t drive a whole lot of people away. But we didn’t do that. And we thought if we just talked about women’s reproductive health, and we talked about what an odious character Trump was, that that would completely turn them off. Well, it turned some off, but not near enough.

Sargent: I do want to point out, though, that Kamala Harris had a real agenda for costs, right?

Carville: Who knew about the agenda?

Sargent: Well, that’s the thing. What I wanted to ask you about is this, right? So Harris had a real agenda on costs. Trump did not have a real agenda on costs. Clearly Trump’s appeal to young men in particular was really about cultural stuff. He got a level of penetration into the information space of those voters that I think Harris did not. And this is not someone who campaigns on policies or on addressing costs in any significant way. He said inflation has been a disaster under Biden and I’ll fix it. But that’s not actually a real agenda. So you’ve said that part of the problem here is informational. I’m not at all dismissing that it’s very real for young people. But the question is: How do you communicate with young people about the problems that they’re facing? You have some thoughts on that, right?

Carville: I do, but let me just preface it by a couple of more things. If you ask people, this one we really know, but people will say crime is up. It’s decidedly down. And like not by just a tiny bit, not marginally, it’s down. Suppose I were to ask a group of your friends, educated, informative, when you think about military recruitment, what do you think it is? It’s off about average or better than average? Huge numbers of people are going to say it’s off; it’s actually exceeding its target. OK, that’s the fact. Now, it’s a fact that no one knows.

So the other thing you tell people, one of the reasons we have high gas prices—actually really don’t now, but let’s shove that argument aside—is there’s too many environmental restrictions on domestic energy production. In the Saturday Wall Street Journal, there was a story that said that all energy companies were rejecting increased production. They already had too much. We’re actually flooding in oil. And they’re scared the price is going to get too low. But no one is deciding on those facts.

Sargent: Right. Trump actually campaigned on drill baby drill, tried to portray the Biden agenda as a disaster on energy production, course, that bullshits.

Carville: They does not want to drill more. In fact, they want to drill less.

Sargent: So what do we do? What do we do about this?

Carville: OK. So it got me to thinking. We don’t know how people get their information. I’m 80. To me, the whole world is the Times, the Post, the nets, cable TV. It dawned on me we don’t do anything. So what I’m trying to do, Greg, is to get people interested and get the right people to do an exhaustive, detailed, well-fielded, well-constructed survey on media consumption—I cannot tell you, I just talked to a pretty active political consultant that did focus groups with black voters in Milwaukee. They’re on TikTok, I don’t even know what TikTok is. Actually the movie gave me a TikTok account. I have no idea what it’s at.

Sargent: James, tick tock is the sound that a clock makes.

Carville: That’s about all I know. I go to my grandchild and go, TikTok, TikTok, TikTok.

Sargent: Right, it’s also a bedtime story too, tick tock.

Carville: Right. So we don’t know. All of the things that we think we know, we don’t know. So we have to start asking ourselves, Where do these people get their information? What do they trust? What do they not trust? And I’ve been calling around and really want to do this. I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to talk about this because I want to stoke interest in this. And sometimes you have an idea and you call 10 people. And five say, That’s a good idea, James. Three say, That’s okay. Two say, That’s bullshit. I’ve called 10 people and 10 people said, You’re damn right we need to do this.

Sargent: Well, James, let me ask you this. You want to do a very deep dive. I imagine not just polling, but a very deep and comprehensive dive into how people are getting their information now, including these groups that Democrats have lost. This is something you think has to be a major agenda item for the party going forward, right?

Carville: I do. It’s beyond just, and it’s also how do we retain the voters that we have? We’ve lost a bunch of ... Somebody sent me to demographic readout and it was pretty much across the board. Now, this is the thinking you laps into, Well, James, it wasn’t a landslide. We only lost by a point and a half. True. But we won by four and a half the last time. Well, six point turnaround in American politics is seal out. It’s like losing a football game 35 to 10. You’re not close.

When this is done—I feel confident that eventually it’s going to be done—we’re all going to be surprised. It’s a hard survey to field. There’s so many different news sources that people have. You can’t do the standard pick from one. The New York Times, the such and such, the session, that’s not going to work. My guess is that when the books are written about this election, the Trump people had a better understanding of who they were talking to, how they were talking to, and again, what medium you talk to people through.

Sargent: I want to ask you little more about that, if I can.

Carville: Way behind on that. It’s a gut, I can’t prove it, but it’s a gut feeling.

Sargent: There’s no question that the Democratic Party is far behind on this particular thing. Are you talking to major Democratic donors about this? Are you trying to raise some real money to put behind this?

Carville: Well, I will. I’m trying to talk to get the right people to feel the poll and then go to them and try to say, I’ll help you. I’ll do Zoom calls. I’ll try to get people behind this. If there’s a new DNC chair, which has traditionally been a giant waste of time. Sorry, it just has ... To say, Maybe, you could get behind this. I don’t know. I’m talking to a lot of different people and the feedback I get is universally positive. We got to get a proposal and a pitch to say, Hey, we’re going to get to do this. This is how we’re going to conduct this survey. This is what we hope to find out.

If we do that, because I know a lot of Democratic donors, and they’re like, Man, what happened? The Harris campaign spent what, a billion and a half dollars? Future Forward was admitting to spending 900 million? I’ve never heard of that kind of money in politics.

Sargent: Are you hearing from any Democratic donors about it? Are they positive about it? I imagine you’re envisioning something more than just a poll, right? Like a major overhaul, a look at how the Democratic Party communicates with voters and how to change that going forward in a big way.

Carville: I’m pretty limited to the media consumption survey. I’m pretty limited right now to how people get their news, which I don’t know and I’ve always said, I’m always a of-what-you-communicate guy, not how-you-communicate, and always let somebody else figure out how we communicate.

Well, no one has done that. So I’ve got to start asking the question myself. Y’all tell me, Did we do radio? Did we do TV? Did we do flyers? Did we do mail? Did we do direct contact? Did we do computer? That’s all passé. I’ve been just living, I know this. I and everybody else is living in the dark. So when you live in a dark, what do you do? You try to turn the goddamn light on. Turn on the flashlight, because we just stumbling around hitting walls, tripping over furniture. Let’s see how we get that. I don’t know anybody that really knows this.

Sargent: Well, let me ask you, James, do you think this should be key for the next DNC chair? I think it should be part of the debate among the candidates for DNC chair. They should say what their strategy is to accomplish what you’re talking about.

Carville: I’ve had two people running for DNC chair that have indicated that they want to talk to me and I’m not going to tell you the names, but I’m going to say this is what you should do. Now, I don’t know if the average DNC member, but I think they can grasp this. We got to stop everything and figure out how we’re going to talk to people before we proceed any further.

I have not begun to talk to major donors yet, but I will. But before I go to them, I’ve got to say, Look, this is what it’s going to cost, this is how we’re going to do it, this is who we think should do it. But I can’t guarantee you what it’s going to say. You might give me quarter million dollars, and it comes back and there’s something inconclusive. I have to accept that that’s a possibility, but we just don’t know how to do it yet. Because of people like you that other people read and you throw this idea out in the people a lot, they know a lot more than you and I do. So it’s having ideas and they’ll respond to it.

Or people will call me and say, Do this or do that. But I’m trying to find the light switch here, dude. The wall is blank right now. We’re fooling around in the dark here. That I know.

Sargent: Well, it’s clear that the Trump campaign really knew how to communicate with young men in a way that we don’t really understand.

Carville: Let’s go back, I’ll give you an example. In March of this year, I knew we had a problem with men. Too many posters, too many campaigns, saying we’re just bleeding men. So I do an interview with Maureen Dowd, and I’m trying to draw attention to the problem, and I said, We have too many preachy females in Democratic campaign culture. Well, you had a predictable fricking reaction.

No one has criticized me since the election for saying that. People would say, Well, you had a point, James.

Sargent: I want to ask you about that.

Carville: I was trying to draw attention to the problem. And the way you draw attention to problem is you draw heat. I drew heat and I was glad to do it.

Sargent: You’ve been on the forefront of saying the Democratic Party is getting trapped into being “woke” by these advocacy groups and stuff, that Democrats need to moderate their positions or at least not speak in faculty language. I want to read to you what Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman had to say about Republican attacks on Representative-elect Sarah McBride, who’s transgender.

Fetterman said this, “There’s no job I’m afraid to lose if it requires me to degrade anyone. If that’s a defining issue for a voter, there will be a different candidate. We have a bathroom in my office that anybody’s welcome to use, including McBride.”

So there you have James Fetterman clearly saying Democrats should forcefully defend the dignity of people like that, marginalized people. That sounds like a message that can win in a swing state. Now, what do you think?

Carville: Look, if you go to the airport in Amsterdam, which I’ve been to, they have stalls. There’s no men’s room. I’m fine with that. Do you know how many bathrooms the United States government has? A million? I don’t care. I really don’t.

Now, what happened, at least for Harris at some point, was for transitioning surgery for prisoners. Well, the simple answer to that is we don’t do elective surgery on prisoners. OK? If you’re in a penitentiary, you can’t get your nose fixed, you can’t have breast augmentation or something like that. That’s a simple enough answer. I don’t disagree with what Senator Fetterman said. I really don’t.

But it goes much deeper than that. That’s an easy thing to dismiss. When you were talking about changing the way that people spoke to each other, the language that they were using, how they were indicating things, the distorted view of history, the faculty lounge relished using language that other people didn’t use that made them feel superior, and it was totally rejected.

Defund the police. You think people remember that? That’s sticky. And of course, I saw what Elissa Slotkin said—I’m trying to get her on my podcast, she’s on vacation—if we need to quit using our language at a faculty lounge, who ever said faculty lounge before? Let me think. Let’s start using the language of the assembly line floor.

Sargent: OK. Great. So let me ask you, is Fetterman using the language of the assembly line floor when he says what he said?

Carville: Fetterman is not a very big fan of me. I don’t really think much about him, but I think he’s right on this.

Sargent: Right, James, you know what I’m saying, right?

Carville: But the governor of Utah, Spencer Cox—they passed a bill in Utah on trans people in high school sports. The guy’s a Mormon, Republican, all right. He said, There are 100,000 high school athletes, six of them are trans. Somebody else figure this out. That’s why you have an athletic association. That’s why you have an Olympic committee. This is not the civil rights issue of our time.

From what I do know, particularly these young children, they have terrible emotional problems. Their suicide rates is of six times. I don’t know the exact number, somebody can figure it out. And I would just say if I were a candidate, I don’t want to cause any more grief for anybody. This is a problem for the state athletic association to figure out, the NCAA to figure it out, the Olympic committee to figure it out. That’s not my problem. That’s a problem people deal with.

Sargent: Here’s the thing. I see you brought up Elissa Slotkin. She said, as you pointed out, something like “identity politics has to go the way of the Dodo,” right? But that strikes me as a little too easy. The complication is, Do we defend people like Sarah McBride or not? And Fetterman said, Yes, we do. Does that mean identity politics isn’t going the way of the Dodo? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. Do we defend these people or not?

Carville: Sarah McBride defends herself very eloquently. She says, I really don’t care I’m trying to raise income for people in Delaware. OK, let’s just follow her. She says this is not a huge issue to her. OK, why should it be the the lead issue to us?

She is saying that. I have great admiration for her response to this. I actually think it’s very smart. She said, No, that’s not the issue here. Of course, you can always make a headline by weighing in on this. It’s a real problem if you’re part of this community, but it’s not very many people. How much of this election was centered around this topic. How many ads did they run on this?

Sargent: A lot.

Carville: A lot. So John Stewart says, These people say that this wokeism hurt us. Actually no Democrat ran on it. John Stewart is correct, but you know who did run on it? The Republicans. The other side gets to play.

Sargent: Right. That’s why you need a response, right? So the question is, Do Democrats engage this the way Fetterman did?

Carville: We spent half this interview talking about trans. That’s for people who are faced with this to do it in the most humane way that we can possibly do it. And we’re going to be sure that everybody has a bathroom that they feel comfortable going to. That’s it. End of it.

Sargent: I mean, that sounds like defending. I understand what you’re saying. You’re saying you don’t drawn into their frame.

Carville: All we do is talk about it. We’re talking about this like it’s the number one issue in American politics.

Sargent: No, you’re absolutely right. Let’s move on.

Carville: Thanks.

Sargent: Biden’s administration, most pro-worker in decades, arguably, right?

Carville: Easily.

Sargent: Biden marched on a picket line, made it easier to unionize, took on corporate concentration, expanded minimum wage and overtime protections, crackdown on labor violations, and his policies have unleashed a huge amount of investments in rebuilding the industrial base, including lots of advanced manufacturing jobs for people without college degrees and left behind areas. I don’t have an answer to this. Why didn’t any of that make a dent on working class voters?

Carville: All of this to be with you, the auto workers got a raise like we never saw before. The screenwriters, the Hollywood writers got huge raises. Everybody was getting competition in the workforce post-pandemic. We’re for raising minimum wage. We didn’t run on it. Why not say America needs a raise, we’re going to give them $15 an hour. Boom, we didn’t say it. Why didn’t we say the most consistently most popular thing in polling is raising in taxes on incomes above say four or five hundred thousand dollars a year. Pick a number. We didn’t run on this.

One of the reasons that I read that the Harris people didn’t want to accentuate the minimum wage because they thought it was anti-business. bullshit. OK. My God. If somebody’s running for president in 2028 as a Democrat, I would get a committee of billionaires to say, Don’t tax you, don’t tax the man behind the tree, tax me.

If we would have said, We’re going to raise taxes and our incomes above 400,000, made it central to our campaign, take that money, which is actually a lot of money over 10 years—it’s a lot—and put that into a first time home buyers mortgage relief fund, then we would have spoken to somebody, Greg. We would have spoken to them.

Sargent: A couple of things about that. A hundred percent. I absolutely agree that if the party is going to improve the working class voters, a big part of it is to be even more economically populist. Biden actually moved in an anti-neoliberal direction and all that. Pretty populist policies, generally pro-worker, but more. I agree, more of it, right? It feels to me like the problem runs a little deeper than whether to run on this policy or on that policy. It seems like what’s missing is a belief among working-class voters that Democrats are focused on their material plight. How do you fix that?

Carville: By focusing on their material plight, by telling them you’re going to raise a minimum wage, by telling them that you’re going to have a transfer of wealth to privilege older people and help younger people. So I was on a GI bill. You know what the GI bill did?

Sargent: Talk about it.

Carville: Where I went to law school, I got $300 a month, tax free, just to spend what I wanted on it. I bought a house, I was locked in at the lowest possible mortgage rate that you could get, and I didn’t have to pay a down payment.

First of all, half the battle is telling people you see them and you see their plight. We didn’t sufficiently do that. Again, we have a lot of misinformation. Military recruitment says actually exceeding targets; energy is so much, we’re producing so much domestic energy, even the people in the energy business don’t want to produce anymore, they’d like to produce less; crime has dropped historical levels. So as opposed to telling people crimes low, go around the country doing events with police people saying you’re doing a great job, you need more support to continue to work than you do it. There’s a ways that you can do this and get your point across and not get trapped in it.

But I’ll go back to our central point, Greg. We don’t know what medium to tell people this and how to get the information to them. We do know there’s a lot of bad information out there. That’s for sure.

Sargent: A big part of the problem is the communication channels. Even including with working-class voters. To go back to your original point, the Biden administration and the Democratic agenda can be more populist and should be more populist economically—left populism. It should be more, there should be more. But allowing for that, the problem isn’t just policy, it’s also communication.

Carville: Well, to me the problem is we don’t even know how people receive the information. So until we find out how they’re getting the information, then we can work on the information that we provide to people. But we’re not sure how they get it. We know that they’re not reading The New Republic or The New York Times. They’re not listening ...

Sargent: Don’t remind me, James.

Carville: OK, I know. Or James Carville’s YouTube channel or anything like that. I don’t understand that, but if we actually find out how to reach them, then we could be more effective in what we reach them with.

Sargent: The next step will be raise some money from donors.

Carville: And figure out who are the best people to conduct this. I don’t want to give anybody’s name right now, but I’ve talked to a couple people, mostly on an academic level that I think do pretty good polling to see how we would design this. How would we do this? How would we reach these people? We can reach them by telephone like we used to. A real deep dive. A real deep dive. When we come out of that, when we come up out of the deep dive and we resurface, we’re going to have some gold nuggets here. It’s possible we could actually find something out that we don’t currently know. At least that’s the hope.

Sargent: Well, I’m 100 percent for it.

Carville: Thank you, Greg. Thank you.

Sargent: You’ve been listening to The Daily Blast with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The Daily Blast is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.