In his ongoing 2024 presidential election postmortem, Democratic Party strategist James Carville claimed that society’s woke "hangover" from 2020 came back to haunt Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign, causing it to fail.
During a recent episode of his "Politics War Room" podcast, the former Bill Clinton adviser pointed to far-left ideas that were trending in 2020 – like the defund the police movement – and argued that voters’ association of those with Harris ended up hurting her campaign and the Democratic "brand" this election cycle.
"The hangover from the whole identity politics is haunting us til this day," Carville declared, after citing polling data indicating that a majority of Americans saw Harris as left wing and rejected her.
He began his point by citing a poll finding late breaking voters thought Harris would support defunding the police, should she have won.
"All of the hangover from the early part of this decade stuck with us," Carville said, referring to liberals and the Democratic Party.
According to Blueprint, a public opinion research initiative designed to help the Democratic with election strategy, one of the top reasons voters rejected Harris this cycle was that she was perceived as too "focused on liberal cultural issues" rather than on issues helping the middle class.
Blueprint's website stated, "Harris couldn’t outrun her past or her party— it was a vice grip that proved impossible to escape."
Despite efforts this cycle to outrun liberal policy proposals she has supported in the past – like supporting Black Lives Matter/Defund the Police groups, and even pledging support for unpopular ideas like taxpayer funding for detained illegal immigrants’ sex changes – voters couldn’t disassociate them from her candidacy.
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Carville pointed out how this anti-woke backlash has manifested, not only in rejecting Harris, but in the culture and business sectors as well.
"And now we see that Walmart is just totally abandoning DEI, and no one says anything," he said, shortly after the retail giant announced on Monday it would be rolling back diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Carville noted he thinks the Democratic Party will be beyond the woke policies by 2028, but still lamented the "damage" wokeness has done.
"The damage that this whole thing did to the brand was really hard," he declared.
The strategist has been reeling since President-elect Donald Trump’s win earlier this month. Only a day or so after the GOP victory, he told his YouTube viewers, "It’s depressing, but I will snap out of it. But it’s very hard."
"I’ll snap out of it, but I’m, I’m, I’m in a very, very dark tunnel right now."
