On Saturday former Clinton advisor James Carville took to YouTube and delivered what purported to be a “Presidential History Lesson.” It was a fairly typical Carvillian rant, yet quite revealing about how worried the Democratic establishment is about the damage the DSA insurgency is doing to their party. He begins his diatribe with the 2000 election and insists that every Democrat loss from then on was caused by leftist attacks on the centrist candidates the party nominated. Thus, George W. Bush won in 2000 because Ralph Nader attacked Al Gore from the left. Likewise, Hillary Clinton lost in 2016 because Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders attacked her from the left.
As with the alleged theft of the 2000 election by SCOTUS, Carville is peddling a shopworn conspiracy theory unsupported by facts.
From there his history lesson ties Nader and Sanders to the current insurgency that the Democratic Socialists have launched and poses the following question: “Is their solution to beat Republicans, to run against Republicans? No, their solution is to beat Democrats.” He then adds this observation: “These people are so f*cking stupid, I don’t know what to say about them.” It’s difficult to argue with that assessment, of course, but Carville’s memory of presidential election results from 2000 onward diverges from the facts. For example, he repeats the obligatory canard about the Supreme Court gifting the presidency to George W. Bush by “stopping the recount.” In fact, Gore was never ahead during the initial count or the two subsequent recounts.
Nonetheless, Carville insists that Ralph Nader received enough support in Florida to permit the judicial theft of the Sunshine State’s electoral college votes: “Rehnquist, Scalia, et al. steal the presidential election, of which the media establishment says, well, the court has spoken.” Next he describes how Sanders cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election: “Bernie Sanders is the reason that Donald Trump is president … So he runs the whole time against Hillary on the dreaded massive income growth, the dreaded reality that we’re dealing with in foreign policy, the massive knowledge of knowing what the hell goes on in the world. But no, we got to blow the whole goddamn thing up again.” Yet, as John Sides wrote in the Washington Post in 2017:
It’s a perennial question whether supporters of losing primary candidates will vote for their party’s nominee in the general election. So let’s compare the Democratic primary with the Republican primary. In the VOTER Survey, only 3 percent of those supporting Texas Sen. Ted Cruz reported voting for Hillary Clinton, as did 10 percent of Florida Sen. Marco Rubio’s supporters and 32 percent of Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s supporters. So, Sanders supporters were as likely to vote for Trump as Rubio’s supporters were to vote for Clinton, and less likely than Kasich supporters were to vote for Clinton.
As with the alleged theft of the 2000 election by SCOTUS, Carville is peddling a shopworn conspiracy theory unsupported by facts. But he’s not finished with his history lesson: “Since 1992, I think it’s seven elections, I think the Democrats won the popular vote, five, 92, 96, 2004, 12, 16, 20, 24, no, it’s eight. It was six out of eight.” In 1992 and 1996 his client won 43 and 49 percent of the popular vote respectively. In 2000 and 2004 Bush won 48 and 51 percent. In 2008 and 2012 Obama won 53 and 51 percent. In 2016 Clinton won 48 percent to Trump’s 46 percent. In 2020, Biden won 51 percent to Trump’s 47 percent. In 2024 Trump won 50 percent to Harris’s 48 percent. But winning the popular vote isn’t how one becomes President.
As Carville himself says to the socialist insurgents in his party, “Run in a country with an electoral college … Run in that country, because that’s the one you live in. It’s not the one that you fantasize about at night. Run in a country where the most important thing to do in an election is to win the thing.” By that standard, Republicans have won 4 of the 7 presidential elections held beginning in 2000. This is why Carville loathes the Social Democrats: “I am a proud liberal. I am not a leftist. I don’t believe you ought to break the thing up.” Well, if Carville really believes that, he needs to go into TDS rehab, stop lying about recent electoral history and help purge his party of the “useful idiots” who are determined to “fundamentally change” it.
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