Longtime Democratic Party strategist James Carville sharply criticized left-wing members of his party and “wokeness” for significant losses on Tuesday’s Election Day.
Pointing to Republican wins in Virginia, a close gubernatorial race in New Jersey, and significant GOP wins in Long Island, Carville lamented the direction his party has taken over the past several years. Most notably, Republican Glenn Youngkin was able to buoy himself against Democrat Terry McAuliffe to take the governor’s race by capitalizing on parents’ concerns that the quasi-Marxist critical race theory-derived curriculum was being taught in public schools.
“What went wrong is just stupid wokeness. Don’t just look at Virginia and New Jersey. Look at Long Island, look at Buffalo, look at Minneapolis, even look at Seattle, Wash[ington]. I mean, this ‘defund the police’ lunacy, this take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. I mean that—people see that,” Carville, a former Clinton administration adviser, told PBS on Wednesday.
In Seattle, Republican-aligned Ann Davison was elected to become the next city attorney, defeating “defund the police” supporter Nicole Thomas-Kennedy. Democratic New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy narrowly appeared to win the governor’s seat again on Wednesday over little-known Republican state lawmaker Jack Ciattarelli, although Ciattarelli’s campaign has signaled that it would contest the results.
Far-left rhetoric, Carville said, “has a suppressive effect all across the country on Democrats. Some of these people need to go to a ‘woke’ detox center or something. ... They’re expressing a language that people just don’t use, and there’s backlash and a frustration at that.”
Suburban residents in both Virginia and New Jersey “pulled away” from “wokeness,” he proclaimed, saying the Democrats mortally wounded themselves with self-inflicted losses. Youngkin never ran any advertisements against President Joe Biden and merely allowed Democrats like McAuliffe to “pull the pin and watch the grenade go off,” Carville explained.
“We got to change this and not be about changing dictionaries and change laws,” he added. “These faculty lounge people that sit around mulling about I don’t know what. ... They’re not working,” Carville said, referring to the trend among many U.S. academics to endorse far-left viewpoints and even Marxist ideology.
Youngkin’s win, some GOP lawmakers predicted, is likely a sign that Republicans would easily recapture the House of Representatives.
“It'll be more than 70 Democrats that will be competitive,” House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said of the 2022 midterms this week. “There’s many that are going to lose their races, based on walking off a cliff—from Nancy Pelosi pushing them.”
