Democrat Carville: The Party Is Hemorrhaging Men; Identity Politics Lost Election
Democratic political strategist James Carville has yet again blamed the Democrats for losing so badly to President-elect Donald Trump and the Republicans on November 5.
The former Clinton legman told Joe Scarborough on the latter’s eponymous Morning Joe that the party has lost men. They no longer want to vote for the party, largely owing to the issue Carville identified in March. The party has been feminized with too many “preachy females.”
But Carville has been telling the party to stop its radical, far-left message since at least 2022.
Diagnosis: The Party of the Petticoat Tyrant is unappealing to normal men.
“We Got a Male Problem”
Scarborough asked Carville the obvious question: What in the heck happened on November 5?
Carville referred back to his interview with The New York Times’ Maureen Dowd in March.
“Lately, he has been obsessed with Biden bleeding Black male voters,” Dowd wrote:
“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the culture of his party. “‘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.’
“If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR [National Public Radio] 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 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?’”
But that wasn’t Carville’s only warning to the Democrats. In April, he warned that the party was losing young men.
“It’s horrifying our numbers among young voters, particularly younger black,” he said. “Younger latinos. Particularly males. We’re not shedding them, they’re leaving in droves.”
Carville’s message was consistent. And it still is. The identity politics must stop, he fumed after Trump won.
He told Democrats to “justify what you did, justify what you did wrong, and tell us what you’re going to do different. What you’ve done ain’t worth a sh*t. Get your head around that.”
But Carville wasn’t finished:
And all of the Washington-based Democrats … going to wine and cheese parties, and talking about how misogynistic [the country is], get your a** out of Washington and go work on a 2026 campaign and do penance to make up for your g**d**n arrogance and stupidity…. Well, we’re going to say we told you so. We told you this identity sh*t was a disaster. We told you to get out in front of public safety issues. You didn’t…. We told you to differentiate yourself from Biden. You didn’t.
Carville repeated that message, sans the blue language, to Scarborough. Men are running from the party.
“Back in March, I said that I thought Democratic campaign culture had ‘too many preachy females,’” he said. “Well, they all had a conniption. Have you looked at the male vote that we got in November?”
“Primarily, we have large problem with males, and I’m not just talking about white males like you and I,” he told Scarborough:
I’m talking about males all across, and we need to address that. And we don’t need to be shouted down by Washington liberal advocacy groups or NPR.
We got to say we got a male problem and we need to get to work on it. And I think we can. … [W]e lost a lot of ground with males and we don’t need to sweep these things under the rug. We need to expose them and talk about them and discuss them.
Carville said the party should have emphasized raising the minimum wage to $15 and promoted raising taxes on anyone earning more than $400,000 annually. He also advocated subsidies for young people to buy homes.
Most Democrats Are Not Progressive
Yet Carville has been preaching that message for two years.
In 2022, when far-left “progressives” were attacking moderate Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia — a state Trump won by 39 points in 2020 and 42 points on November 5 — Carville explained to the Vox website how small the “progressive” contingent in the party is.
“But some of these people b***hing about Manchin can’t see political reality straight,” Carville said:
Six percent of adults in this country identify as “progressive.” Only 11 or 12 percent of Democrats identify as progressive. So let’s just meet in the middle and say something like 7 or 8 percent of the country agrees with the progressive left. This ain’t a g**d**n debate anymore. Someone like Manchin is closer to the mainstream than a lot of these people think, and pretending like he isn’t won’t help the cause.
That is why permitting the party to be steered into such kooky positions as “defunding the police” and its obsession with “identity politics” ended in the disaster he said it would.
“Only 11 percent of the Democratic Party is progressive,” Carville said. “It’s the smallest part of the party. But the problem is they make 70 percent of the noise.”
And, importantly, they make almost all the party’s decisions on policy.
“We could never wash off the stench of [wokeism],” Carville told Dowd after the election. “Defund the police,” Carville said, are “the three stupidest words in the English language.”