James Carville has been sounding alarms about his own party for months, and most Democrats have ignored him.
Now he’s watching socialist candidates surge in Michigan and Wisconsin, and the Ragin’ Cajun is losing his mind over it.
And what Carville just said about one candidate’s signature policy could haunt every Democrat running in a competitive state this fall.
When the Party’s Own Strategist Calls It “Lunacy”
Carville co-hosts his “Politics War Room” podcast with pundit Al Hunt, and the two of them have spent recent weeks watching their party drift in a direction Carville clearly can’t stomach.
A wave of democratic socialist candidates winning Democratic primaries in New York City, Abdul El-Sayed’s competitive bid for the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s US Senate seat, and Francesca Hong’s frontrunner status in the Democratic primary for Wisconsin governor have signaled a significant shift to the left for the party.
Carville didn’t mince words about what he thinks of it.
“The problem we face right now in Wisconsin: This candidate doesn’t want to defund the police. She wants to abolish the police,” Carville warned.
“So, if we had a Republican gubernatorial nominee in the state of, I don’t know, Colorado, pick a state, Tennessee — that was advocating lunacy of this level … and this is lunacy of the highest level you can imagine … we would be totally justified in taking that message nationally. We would be totally justified in saying you’ve got to ask these people when they make an appearance if they agree with this,” he continued.
“Well, they’re going to do that to us. And I got to say, you go to a person in a tight race — you go to Roy Cooper, you go to Jon Ossoff, you go to Troy Jackson — and you say, ‘Your nominee in Wisconsin said this. What do you answer?’ That’s not a chicken-s— question at all. And you’re just opening yourself up for all of that crap.”
He’s right, of course. And the fact that a lifelong Democrat operative is the one saying it should tell voters everything they need to know about how far off the deep end the party’s base has gone.
Who Are These Candidates and What Do They Actually Believe?
Francesca Hong has repeatedly called for abolishing police departments. Hong, a 37-year-old state representative and democratic socialist, wrote on X in 2020 she supported “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police.”
She later argued in 2021 that “police exist to uphold white supremacy.”
When pressed on whether she still holds those views, Hong sidestepped repeated questions at Marquette University in Milwaukee about whether she still wants to abolish police, following a televised debate in which she pledged to preserve law enforcement funding amid scrutiny of her previous position.
Hong’s campaign communications director Allison Geyer told Fox News Digital that the candidate had not changed her underlying values on police and prison abolition, although she now discusses the issue differently. “Rep. Hong has spoken in the past about police and prison abolition as an aspirational goal, akin to eradicating disease or eliminating poverty,” Geyer said.
So the campaign’s own spokesperson confirmed she hasn’t changed her mind — she’s just changed how she talks about it. That’s not moderation. That’s a messaging makeover.
A Marquette Law School poll released recently showed Hong at 38% among Democratic primary voters, up from 26% one week earlier.
Over in Michigan, the primary is a head-to-head pitting El-Sayed, a former public health official backed by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and other prominent progressives, against Representative Haley Stevens, a moderate with a track record of winning on red turf.
El-Sayed is up by a whopping 15 points over Representative Haley Stevens in the Democrat primary race for Michigan’s US Senate seat, according to recent polling. And the stakes in Michigan are nowhere near as low as those New York races — Democrats almost certainly need to retain the seat of retiring Senator Gary Peters to have a path to the net four-seat gain the party needs to win a Senate majority in November’s midterm elections.
El-Sayed has tried to distance himself from the socialist label. “Because I’m simply not a socialist,” El-Sayed said. But his platform includes getting money out of politics and passing Medicare for All — the full government takeover of American healthcare that would eliminate private insurance, ration care, and put Washington bureaucrats in charge of your doctor’s decisions. That’s the dictionary definition of socialism.
He not only boasts the support of prominent socialists Senator Bernie Sanders and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but has also gone out of his way to link himself to self-described democratic socialist and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Carville Sees the Trap — and Nobody’s Listening
Carville has been watching this slow-motion wreck build for a while. While Carville has repeatedly predicted big wins for Democrats in the midterm elections, his mood has somewhat soured in recent months to the point he has proposed a schism to keep the rising far-left flank out of power.
He rhetorically asked democratic socialists, “Why don’t you get another name? Why are you dragging our names through the mud with your bulls—? If you don’t like it, call yourself something else.” Carville joked that the term “Democratic” can be appropriated even by tyrannical regimes like the Democratic Republic of North Korea and that America’s democratic socialists are genuinely confusing voters.
“If you’re so against everything, then create your own name. Don’t use our name. Don’t be tainted,” Carville exclaimed.
“But I got to tell you, I hope that voters in the primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin understand you’re not just voting for a nominee for Senate in Michigan. You’re not just voting for a nominee for governor of Wisconsin. You’re voting on the image of the entire party, and there’s a lot at stake here. And this is not time for a vanity vote. Not at all. And that’s what this is — a vanity vote and nothing more.”
And Hunt responded by recalling that, after the death of George Floyd in 2020, some Democrats embraced the agenda of defunding the police, which enabled Republicans to paint the entire party with that agenda. They’re walking right back into the same trap, and Carville can see it coming from a mile away.
But here’s the thing — Carville’s warnings aren’t just about electoral math. The policies these candidates are pushing represent a genuine threat to the kind of ordered, free society that makes American prosperity possible. Abolishing police isn’t a quirky progressive position. It’s a radical proposal that would leave working-class neighborhoods — the very people these candidates claim to champion — more vulnerable to crime and disorder. Socialism, wherever it’s been tried, has delivered shortages, stagnation, and the steady erosion of individual freedom. Every country that went down that road has a story that ends the same way.
The Democrat Party establishment knows this. Carville knows this. And the fact that the party’s base keeps nominating candidates who don’t seems to be something even their own strategists can’t explain away anymore.
“I am a proud liberal. I am not a leftist. I don’t believe you ought to break the thing up. I think the role of government is to help people, to be a partner with people, to help them get educated, to help them have retirement security, to make them secure in this world, and make them secure in their homes,” he told listeners. “And if you believe that, blame the left wing of the Democratic Party for the catastrophe that we’re facing right now, because as much as any group, it’s their fault.”
The Democrat Party is in the middle of an identity crisis it created for itself, and the candidates winning primaries right now are the proof. Republicans running in Michigan and Wisconsin in November didn’t need to do anything to set this trap. The left did it for them.
And voters in those swing states are going to have a very clear picture of what the Democrat Party stands for by the time Election Day arrives.
Sources: Fox News, Fox Wilmington, WFMD, RealClearPolitics, The Hill, CNN, Breitbart, Axios