James Carville was on MSNBC this Saturday after the Bernie Sanders resounding victory in Nevada talking about a variety of things, all meant to blunt the impact of Bernie’s victory with Nevada voters. Bernie won self-identified Very Liberal Voters, Somewhat Liberal Voters and Moderate/Conservative voters, he won half the Latino vote, he finished second with 28% of the black vote, he won 28% of the white vote, he won union households and non-union households. He won every age group other than those over 65, he won women, he won men, he won the native population. Most of those by double-digit margins. But for some reason he is unelectable.
James also raised the specter of Bernie’s Russian backing. Funny thing is, according to the press, every Democrat that has ever beat a Republican when a republican was the last president, other than Bill had Russian backing.
James Carville then launched into a discussion with Nichole Wallace about voters committing “political suicide” and how awful Bernie would for down-ballot candidates, particularly in the House.
Let’s look at some facts
James Carville developed a strategy in 1992 that won Bill Clinton the presidency. That was a good achievement for him for sure. The party embraced Carville’s strategic and tactical approach starting in the 1994 cycle and that has largely been the paradigm they/we have followed ever since. I think that is fairly inarguable.
Given that, there is a track record to review here. House races. So after the 1994 cycle, Republicans swept into a House Majority with the beginning of the 1995 congress. From their Republicans have been in the majority for 20 of the last 25 years.
Republicans holding a majority for 80% of the time we have been deploying Carville’s strategic and tactical framework and general way of thinking about down-ballot races does not actually support any notion that continuing to follow that paradigm works. In fact, it is a CLEAR DEMONSTRATION that that paradigm is a failed one.
What will it take before people accept this fact? 40 of 50 years in the minority? Because that is what that paradigm is likely to yield given what has happened in actual elections since the Carville model has been deployed party-wide.
And look, I know that the moderate candidates flipped almost all the seats in 2018. I get that. But the real effective strategic play of the Carville strategy is to actually beat the left in primaries. Many state party infrastructures (major donors in the state for example), such that they exist at all, are geared up to support moderates over more left candidates. So yeah, those candidates won the primary races in the districts the party targeted because they were ripe to flip. I mean beating the left has been the core of the reach out to moderate strategy the entire time.
The problem is they got real good at beating the left in primaries but never got good at beating Republicans in the general.
it’s time to dump that failed strategic and tactical thinking into the dustbin of history. It is time to find and embrace a new paradigm. I urge my fellow partisans to stop fighting the left so hard, certainly stop fearing when someone from what constitutes our left wins a nomination.
Let’s find the best candidate for each and every district and work together to win those general elections.