James Carville Wants Dems to Embrace ‘Autocratic’ Campaigns: ‘Shortcoming’ Is ‘Everybody Has a Seat at the Table’
Screenshot via Politicon
James Carville said a “shortcoming” of “Democratic politics” is “everybody has a seat at the table” when they need to be more autocratic.
The Democratic strategist joined Ryan Lizza on Friday’s episode of Politico’s Playbook Deep Dive podcast and during a discussion about a new documentary called Winning Is Everything, Carville said campaigns need to be more autocratic.
“I would always tell people in campaigns: if you want a democracy after the election, you have to have an autocracy before the election. When I hear people say, ‘We gotta have an inclusive and we gotta listen to everybody,’ no you don’t,” Carville said.
“There’s a famous political science expression — ‘Democracy is to be found between the parties, not within the parties,'” Lizza said. “In other words, that’s when the primary system was coming along and the parties became over-democratized, there was this kind of backlash by some political scientists. You know what I’m talking about.”
Carville agreed and said the “shortcoming” in Democratic campaigns can be that they are too inclusive of too many voices. The strategist argued campaigns are not based on degrees or “what your GPA was.”
“It’s more of an instinctive thing that some people have and some people don’t,” he said.
According to Carville, not all skill sets are “equal.”
“It’s been always, I think, a shortcoming of Democratic politics that everybody has a seat at the table and everybody can be heard,” he said. “No, not everybody’s skill set is equal.”
Carville has said he has a difficult time seeing how Vice Presidnet Kamala Harris could lose in November, but he did predict that swing states are likely to go one way or the other together based on past results, rather than splitting more evenly between the candidates.
“If there are seven swing states, the most unlikely result is they break four, three,” he said, predicting “somebody is going to close a lot better.”
