James Carville Tells Progressive Democrats to Split from Party: ‘You Go Your Way and We Go Our Way’

CARVILLE: “So maybe we need to have a schism. Maybe you — you — you got plenty different — justice party, the working families party, the socialist party. The only thing I’d ask is just don’t use the word democratic in any title that you have. Because most Democrats that I know that are running for office, don’t want you — your name, don’t want you to be part of the deal. Yeah, sure they would be glad to take your votes. Who wouldn’t? Everybody wants to get as many votes as they can. Maybe you come up with your own name. And by the way, nothing against, after the election, can sit down and do like it’s done in parliamentary governments or governments around the world. You sit down and you say, ‘OK, we want to be part of a government majority. And we have these things that we want you to do to bring us in.’ And we have negotiations and we figure a way that we can live with different parties, different titles, but under the same general philosophical roof. I — as I’ve always said, I’ve been very clear that most of the things that the [indecipherable] left wants, 85 percent of them, I want to, we’d like to expand opportunities for people. We’d like to expand people that have health care. We’d like to do more to help young voters. We think that environmental problems are totally crushing that we face. We want solutions there. We think income inequality is — is — is — is a terrible thing. And we’ve got to do certain things to address it. Like, ‘Oh, OK. We can raise taxes on incomes over $400,000 a year, raise the minimum wage. These are the things that we can work on.’ I don’t think we can work together on pronoun politics. I — I — I — I don’t — I think that you’re not — this election did not teach you how damaging that is, I don’t think there’s anything that I can tell you, and you say this guy is stuck in another century, not another decade, and he represents nothing to do with the future of our movement. I can accept that. Because you know, you are not really going to hurt my feelings. So maybe we could have a kind of amical split here and we’ll go to post in 2026. Because you don’t even run. They never run against a Republican. OK? All they do is run against other Democrats. I don’t quite understand why you’re so anxious to have the word Democrat in the description of what you do, but maybe we can have an amical split here, and you go your way and we go our way. And after the election, we come together and see how much common ground we can find.”