James Carville: Democrats' 'Wokeness is a Problem and We All Know It'
Democrat political strategist and elections expert James Carville told Vox on Tuesday that Democrats have been losing congressional seats because of their major “messaging problem” of “wokeness” and “everyone knows it.”
Carville said he is worried about where the Democrat party is headed because of their terrible job messaging. He said look at the 2020 election where President Joe Biden “only narrowly defeated Trump” and came “within 42,000 votes of losing.”
Democrats also “lost congressional seats” instead of picking up more during a presidential campaign year. Now, Democrats have the slimmest majority in the House. He continued to say Democrats even “failed to pick up state legislatures.”
Carville claims during the interview the Democrats “wokeness is a problem and we all know it” but fell short of condemning the far-left policies Democrats are trying to push through the Congress. He only wanted to condemn their messaging tactics.
When asked about messaging in the Biden administration, Carville told Vox he is glad the administration does not use “faculty lounge” phraseology. He explained “faculty lounge” politics is when you have people in fancy colleges using a made-up language that ordinary people do not recognize. For example, the voter base does not necessarily use phrases like “LatinX” or “communities of color.”
Carville thinks it is important to talk about race or racial injustice, but Democrats “need to do it without using jargon-y language that’s unrecognizable to most people.” He believes the works like “LatinX” or “communities of color” really “signals that you’re trying to talk around them,” adding, “this ‘too cool for school’ shit doesn’t work, and we have to stop it.”
Carville stated if “Democrats want power, they have to win in a country where 18 percent of the population controls 52 percent of the Senate seats. That’s a fact. That’s not changing. That’s what this whole damn thing is about.” After talking to many people in the Democrat party, he believes no one wants to say the quiet part out loud besides himself, “wokeness is a problem and everyone knows it.”
“Part of the problem is that lots of Democrats will say that we have to listen to everybody and we have to include every perspective, or that we don’t have to run a ruthless messaging campaign,” he added. The Democrats need to run a ruthless messaging campaign, but for the Democrats who speak up, either “get clobbered or canceled.”
The solution Carville offers to Democrats, both on the Republicans’ strong messaging campaign against the Democrats and in order to keep the majority in power, is to “include more rural white voters from across the country.” He added, “Democrats are never going to win a majority of these voters,” but Democrats need to start losing these types of voters by a lesser margin.
Carville thinks that “Republicans are going to call us socialists no matter what,” but they cannot be the reason for Democrats to “just run as out-and-out socialists.”
If you look at the bigger picture, Carville explained, everyone should look at the Democrats’ messaging revolving around Florida. The Democrats have been calling it a “lost cause” for years. Carville claims Florida is not lost, adding in 2018, Florida gave felons the right to vote, and in 2020, the minimum wage was increased to $15 an hour, something he claims has no chance of passing federally. Carville really believes there is nothing wrong with Florida, but there is a problem with the type of campaign Democrats run, claiming they “should be able to win” states like Florida without any problem.
The Democrats’ messaging, he claims, is also why you can look all across the Rio Grande Valley and see why all of the solid blue Democrat voters were lost. Carville blames this on “the faculty lounge bullshit.”
Carville also claims the Democrat Party “can’t be more liberal than Sen. Joe Manchin” because they will not be able to pass anything. He says this is the reason why Democrats in Congress are not able to pass more far-left ideas every day.
“Republicans are way more disciplined about taking a thing and branding it” than the Democrats are, he stated. This is why the Democrats cannot “fuck it up” and lose the majority they currently have.
