Democratic strategist James Carville expressed concern that Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign is devoting itself to losing talking points ahead of Election Day.
Carville caught the nation’s eye when he helped lead former President Bill Clinton’s campaign to victory in 1992 by coining popular phrases such as “it’s the economy, stupid.”
Though a strong supporter of Harris, Carville has sometimes criticized her campaign strategy during the roughly 2 1/2 months she has spent atop the Democratic ticket. During his most recent appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the longtime Democrat advised the vice president to stop talking about the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol and who won the 2020 election, familiar themes in her presidential campaign.
“We’ve talked about Jan. 6 ad infinitum, ad nauseam. We’ve been talking about who won the election. Leave it alone,” Carville said as he urged the Harris campaign to “selectively pick out what it is that they want to talk about.”
“Be aggressive. Don’t take anything for granted. I think that’s a good lesson for VP Harris’ campaign… The lesson of my life in politics is aggressiveness pays off.”
— @JamesCarville shares his campaign expertise and lessons learned pic.twitter.com/VR7EOcVlqz
— Morning Joe (@Morning_Joe) October 9, 2024
Claiming that Trump instigated the Jan. 6 riot, the Harris campaign’s allegations that he is a threat to democracy have become a running theme on the campaign trail.
“On that day, the president of the United States incited a violent mob to attack our nation’s capital, to desecrate our nation’s capital,” Harris claimed during her September debate against Trump, also accusing him of taking an “approach that is about attacking the foundations of our democracy.”
But Carville urged Harris to instead pivot to talking about saving healthcare and attacking the Trump campaign on the Affordable Care Act. Obamacare, as the ACA is popularly known, came up during the recent vice presidential debate between Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) and Gov. Tim Walz (D-MN).
Speaking on the debate stage in New York earlier this month, Vance argued that Trump’s actions to mandate price transparency for healthcare providers and establish state reinsurance waivers during his first term in office “salvaged Obamacare.”
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Calling Vance’s debate claims “a massive lie,” Carville said the Harris campaign should roll out top Democrats to combat “this disinformation.”
“Have Bill Clinton go do actualities in every market, in every swing state,” he said. “Have Obama come out and say, how dare he say this about our healthcare plan.”