Transcript: James Carville on why Trump won – and what Democrats should do now

Carville: We spent half of this interview talking about transgender people. That’s for people who have had to deal with this, to do it in the most humane way possible. And we will make sure that everyone has a bathroom that they feel comfortable in. That’s it. End of it.

Sargent: I mean, that sounds like defense. I understand what you’re saying. You say that you are not drawn into their frame.

Carville: All we do is talk about it. We talk about this as if it is the number one issue in American politics.

Sargent: No, you’re absolutely right. Let’s move on.

Carville: Thank you.

Sargent: The Biden administration, perhaps the most pro-worker in decades, right?

Carville: Easy.

Sargent: Biden marched on a picket line, made it easier to unionize, took on business concentration and expanded minimum wage and overtime protections, a crackdown on labor violations, and his policies have unleashed a huge amount of investment in rebuilding the industrial base, including many advanced manufacturing jobs for those without college degrees and underserved areas. I don’t have an answer to this. Why hasn’t all this made a dent among working-class voters?

Carville: All this to be with you, auto workers got a raise like we’ve never seen before. The screenwriters, the Hollywood writers got huge raises. After the pandemic, everyone faced competition in the job market. We are in favor of raising the minimum wage. We did not flee from it. Why don’t we say America needs a raise, we give them $15 an hour. Boom, we didn’t say it. Why didn’t we say the most consistent thing? The hottest thing in polls is raising taxes on incomes above, say, four or five hundred thousand dollars a year. Choose a number. We have not gone into this.

One of the reasons I read was that the Harris people didn’t want to highlight the minimum wage because they thought it was anti-business. nonsense. OK. My God. If someone were to run as a Democrat in 2028, I would have a committee of billionaires say: Don’t burden you, don’t burden the man behind the tree, don’t burden me.

If we had said: We’re going to raise taxes and raise our incomes above 400,000. If we had made it the center of our campaign, take that money, which is actually a lot of money over ten years – it’s a lot – and put it into a mortgage fund for first-time homebuyers, we would have talked to someone, Greg. We would have spoken to them.

Sargent: A few things about that. One hundred percent. I absolutely agree that if the party wants to improve working-class voters, a large part of it needs to be more economically populist. Biden was actually moving in an anti-neoliberal direction and all that. Pretty populist policies, generally pro-labor, but more. I agree, more of it, right? It feels to me like the problem is something deeper than whether this policy or that policy should be implemented. It seems that wWhat’s missing is the belief among working-class voters that Democrats are focused on their material situation. How do you solve that?

Carville: By focusing on their material situation, by telling them that you are going to raise a minimum wage, by telling them that you are going to have a transfer of wealth to privilege older people and help younger people. So I was on a GI Bill. Do you know what the GI Bill did?

Sargent: Talk about it.

Carville: When I went to law school, I was given $300 a month, tax free, just to spend what I wanted. I bought a house, was locked into the lowest mortgage rate you could get, and didn’t have to make a down payment.

First of all, telling people you see them and that you see their plight is half the battle. We don’t do that enough. Again, we have a lot of misinformation. According to military recruitment, targets are actually exceeded; energy is so much, we produce so much domestic energy, even the people in the energy sector don’t want to produce more, they want to produce less; Crime has fallen historically. So oneIf you don’t want to tell people that crimes are low, go around the country doing events with police officers saying you’re doing a great job, that you need more support to keep working than you are doing. There are ways you can do this and get your point across without getting caught up in it.

But I’m going back to our central point, Greg. We don’t know which medium to tell people about this and how to get the information to them. We know there is a lot of bad information out there. That’s for sure.

Sargent: A big part of the problem is the communication channels. Even with working class voters. To return to your original point, the Biden administration and the Democratic agenda can be and should be more populist economically – left populism. It has to be more, there has to be more. But if we take that into account, the problem is not just policy, but also communication.

Carville: For me, the problem is that we don’t even know how people receive the information. So until we figure out how they get the information, we can work on the information we provide to people. But we’re not sure how they get them. We know they don’t read The New Republic or The New York Times. They don’t listen…

Sargent: Don’t remind me, James.

Carville: Okay, I know. Or James Carville o’s YouTube channelr something like that. I don’t understand that, but if we actually figure out how to reach them, we can be more effective in how we reach them.

Sargent: The next step is raising money from donors.

Carville: And find out who the best people are to carry this out. I don’t want to mention anyone’s name right now, but I’ve talked to a few people, especially at the academic level, who I think do. pretty good poll to see how we would design this. How would we do this? How would we reach these people? We can reach them by telephone as we are used to. A real deep dive. A real deep dive. When we come out of that, when we come out of the deep dive and come back up, we’ll have some gold nuggets here. It’s possible we can actually find out something which we currently do not know. At least that’s the hope.

Sargent: Well, I’m 100 percent for it.

Carville: Thank you, Greg. Thank you.

Sargent: You listened The daily explosion with me, your host, Greg Sargent. The daily explosion is a New Republic podcast and is produced by Riley Fessler and the DSR Network.