Carville Says Dems ‘Lapsed Into Stupidity’ Focusing Too Much on Trump

A veteran Democratic strategist admits he allowed himself to be distracted by a clash of personalities during the campaign and lost sight of what he believes matters most to voters.

Speaking with CNN’s Michael Smerconish on Saturday morning, James Carville conceded that thinking about the outcome of the November vote was “depressing,” but argued that doing so was entirely necessary given his party clearly has some hard lessons to learn going forward.

He said, “You know, Michael, there’s the simple, basic rule of politics, [which is that] voters want an election about them. They don’t want an election about you or your opponent. And for too much, we lost that, I lost it myself.”

Carville went on, “We made it about Trump and we didn’t make it about voters, and that’s all. It’s never a good idea. How could I, at 80 years old, been doing this for 50 years, lapse into that level of stupidity? You know, I’ve got to ask myself, but I think we did.”

Earlier in the broadcast, Carville and Smerconish had been discussing an op-ed penned by the Democratic strategist for The New York Times this week, in which Carville wrote the party ought to have stuck to its guns honing in on economic issues facing everyday voters.

In short, he said, the Democratic Party should really have stuck with his trademark, tried-and-tested adage: “It’s the economy, stupid.”

“We interact with the economy, people do, multiple times a day,” Carville told Smerconish. “The abortion issue, that’s an economic issue to many people.”

He added, “There’s so many other things that you can frame as economic issues. Every day, you go to the grocery store, you go to the drugstore, you go to the gas station, you go online, you have 40 economic interactions every day, and you can’t remove that from people’s lives, you just can’t do that.”

Comparing the results of the recent election to a plane crash, Carville said Democrats would now need to spend time examining the wreckage in order to determine what exactly went wrong.

He said, “You don’t say, well, let’s just forget about it and move on, no. Was the flap set in the right setting or, you know, was there something that the pilot didn’t pay attention to?”

Carville later added, “You know, let’s learn from this. It’s a disaster, I agree, it’s depressing, but to have an event like this and not learn from it, I think is the biggest mistake we can make.”