Democratic strategist James Carville said during a Thursday discussion that Democratic swing-state senators considered overcoming their party’s brand to be their biggest challenge as candidates.
March polling by CNN/SSRS and NBC News found that the Democratic Party has reached record lows in popularity among voters — 29% and 27%, respectively.
Carville, during a discussion at The University of Chicago Institute of Politics, particularly noted Democratic Arizona Sen. Ruben Gallego and Democratic Michigan Sen. Elissa Slotkin, both elected in 2024, as examples of senators who faced difficulties due to their party affiliation.
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“Democrats have become — not all, but a lot of them — what I call the NPR. They love preening and talking about how moral they are and how they have to exist in this corrupt, misogynistic, racist, backward-looking, uneducated, you know, tobacco-chewing company,” Carville said. “And people rebel against that. That’s not the way that you get some of these people back. And we do better with younger people in these areas. We do better with females than we do with males.”
“But we can do a lot better. And if you talk to, like, Senator Liz Slotkin or Ruben, they’ll tell you the hardest thing they had to overcome was a ‘D’ after their name, okay?” he continued. “That was the one thing that they had to — we have created a party for people to run from, not to run on.”
Carville also said Democrats in heavily blue areas are hurting their colleagues in swing areas.
“The most relevant point is the partisan lean of the district. ‘Cause when somebody is in a +25 Democratic district and they’re popping their mouth off, they’re not helping,” he said. “They’re not helping the people that we’re going to win with in the +4 or -4 districts, alright? When I see these urban Democrats — ‘We have got to get out there, and we’ve got to do this, and we got to do that’ — well, calm down a little bit.”
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“We got to elect people in Pennsylvania. We got to elect people in Michigan. We got to elect people in Georgia. We got to elect people in North Carolina,” he continued. “And people encourage that, and they send ’em a lot of money overnight. They’re not helping you.”
Carville and Slotkin criticized their party in February for treating all minorities as if they are identical, rather than recognizing their uniqueness.
“The most racist thing that I hear is when people say ‘communities of color’ or ‘people of color’ because that assumes that everybody that is not white is the same, which is that, like, it’s horribly, a horribly — I think it’s racist to say, ‘Well, Filipinos are the same as Hondurans, are the same as Nigerians, are the same as Indonesians’ is absurd,” Carville said. “And they just keep using this language and I think they’re too naive to know how stupid it is.”
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“I think, again, the data will show you that it’s just not accurate, right? I mean, you look at, where, you know, some of our Muslim American communities voted, where some of our South Asian American families voted. I mean, it just, it doesn’t work, at least in a state like Michigan,” Slotkin responded. “It’s like a giant mixing bowl on political preferences, and if you, you know, think that you understand a community because of their country of origin, you’re just, you haven’t run in a swing state.”
Gallego has also criticized colleagues in his party for how they treat Latinos.
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First published by the Daily Caller News Foundation.
