James Carville Says Democrats Should Run Autocratic Campaigns if They “Want a Democracy After the Election”

(DCNF)—Democratic strategist James Carville on Friday argued that his party’s candidates should adopt an authoritarian approach to campaigning in order to secure “a democracy” post-election.

Democrats have consistently characterized former President Donald Trump as a “threat to our democracy,” but a New York Times/Siena College poll released Monday finds Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris tied at 47% among voters in key swing states — Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina — on who they trust to handle democracy. Carville, on Politico’s “Playbook Deep Dive” podcast, said Democrats should focus solely on winning rather than being “inclusive.”

LISTEN:

“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 laughing.

“There’s a famous political science expression … ‘Democracy is to be found between the parties, not within the parties,” Lizza responded. “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 said he was aware of what Lizza was referring to and added, “It’s been always, I think, a shortcoming of Democratic politics that everybody has a seat at the table and everybody can be heard. No, not everybody’s skill set is equal.”

The New York Times described the finding from its own poll about voters’ trust of the candidates on the issue of democracy as “striking,” given Trump’s past impeachment for what they called “his role” in the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. However, some Democrats have suggested Harris’ process of becoming the Democratic Party’s nominee for president was undemocratic as it was based on a party insider vote with virtually no primary voter approval.

“To be a member of the Democratic Party, historically, is above all, to be a member of a coalition. We actually practice coalition politics way more than they do. And what I would tell people: ‘If you’re in a coalition and you’re comfortable, you’re not in a coalition.’ The nature of a coalition is to cause certain members of the coalition some discomfort,” Carville said later in the podcast. “Now our coalition goes from [former Vice President] Dick Cheney to [Democratic Washington Rep.] Pramila Jayapal. Somebody is going to be uncomfortable in this coalition.”

“The contradictions in the coalition get resolved after the election, not before the election. And that’s very, very important to remember,” he added. “And the other thing to remember is, he now has changed his mind, I congratulate him, but in 2016, [Independent Vermont Sen.] Bernie Sanders said, ‘The important thing is to have the argument, not win the election.’ No, the important thing is to win the election, then you have the argument.”

Sanders recently said on NBC News that Harris isn’t “abandoning” the “progressive” values she ran on during her 2020 campaign, but added that he thinks “she’s trying to be pragmatic and doing what she thinks is right in order to win the election.”

The vice president has backtracked on many of the far-left policy positions she previously held and has employed a press-averse strategy since launching her 2024 presidential campaign on July 21.

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