James Carville: I Was Wrong About Kamala Harris

Democratic strategist James Carville used a word we don’t often hear in politics these days.

“I thought Kamala Harris would win. I was wrong,” he wrote Thursday in a New York Times editorial.

After spending the last two months analyzing why and how president-elect Donald Trump beat the vice president in November’s presidential election, Carville landed on a very 1992 argument.

“We lost for one very simple reason: It was, it is and it always will be the economy, stupid,” he wrote. “Democrats have flat-out lost the economic narrative. The only path to electoral salvation is to take it back.”

His piece argued that Democrats had lost the perception battle, though it didn’t really analyze why Harris’ economic message failed to land.

The vice president spent hundreds of millions of dollars promoting her 82-page plan for an “opportunity economy” that would have bolstered the middle class by cutting taxes, banning price gouging and helping first-time home buyers.

Trump also vowed to cut taxes but plans to impose massive tariffs and deport immigrants, both of which are expected to backfire by driving up the price of goods and services. His campaign surrogate Elon Musk flat-out stated Trump’s plans would create “temporary” economic hardship, though economists debate just how temporary it will be.

Carville’s piece seemed to imply that all of this got lost in the noise of attacking Trump.

“It’s clear many Americans do not give a rat’s tail about Mr. Trump’s indictments—even if they are justified—or about his anti-democratic impulses or about social issues if they cannot provide for themselves of their families,” he wrote.

Once they’ve honed their laser-sharp economic message, Carville continued, Democrats need to take yet another page from Trump, who spent the presidential campaign avoiding journalists and their pesky follow-up questions in favor of the warm embrace of friendly podcasters’ couches.

“Democrats must trudge headfirst with this economic agenda into the new media paradigm we now live in,” Carville wrote. “Podcasts are the new print newspapers and magazines. Social platforms are a social conscience. And influencers are digital stewards of that conscience.”

And yet, news influencers on social media overwhelmingly lean to the right, Axios has found. Most of the top 25 podcasters on Spotify are conservative or anti-establishment, even if they don’t explicitly call themselves right-wing, The Guardian reported in November.

Meaning Democrats are facing a media landscape that is not just fractured, but potentially hostile. And if that’s the case, it might indeed be the economy. But it might also be that the halcyon days of the early 1990s—when the message was all that mattered—are firmly in the past.