Politics

‘We Won. And I Feel Like Shit’

THE NEW ABNORMAL

In this post-election episode of The New Abnormal, Rick, Molly, and James Carville suss out why, despite a potential Trump loss, it doesn‘t feel like a victory.

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Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty

James Carville, like the rest of us, is having some mixed emotions at the moment. After getting all kinds of polling data saying the Democrats would clean up, the truth is… well, kind of the opposite happened.

The gap between expectations and reality was so big, even Joe Biden apparently being on the precipice of taking the White House seems just a little unsatisfying.

“Look, this is the biggest election in my lifetime, before my lifetime. And I wake up in the morning, we won the popular vote and we're going to win the electoral college. And I feel like fucking shit,” Carville tells Molly Jong-Fast and Rick Wilson on the post-election edition of The New Abnormal.

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“Yes, we will have competent cabinet secretaries. And yes, we will have competent ambassadors. And the trains will run on time. And that's about it, right? That's something. That's a lot more than we've got now. But it's not anything close to what we all were hopeful for,” he adds.

Buck up, Rick tells Carville (and the rest of us).

“Donald Trump is about to ride into the sunset—and by sunset, I mean prison—in the immediate future. People need to be of good cheer. This is a stunning victory,” Rick says, anticipating that the absentee votes in places like Pennsylvania and Michigan will break Biden’s way.

“It says something about our political pessimism in the era of Trump that everyone's depressed about this outcome. Get the fuck outta here. We just beat Donald fucking Trump.”

Maybe so, Molly replies. But she’s still pissed—like, beyond pissed—at the pollsters who gave so many false hope. “Fuck those fuckers,” she says, before a whole bunch of stuff we had to bleep out.

Listen to The New Abnormal on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Stitcher.

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