James Carville says Democrats must realize youth are not a static voting bloc

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville lamented in a video posted Friday that he and the Democratic Party have made some faulty assumptions about young people, and young focus groups are a clear indicator why.

In the past decade, the perception of young voters has varied wildly, from being overwhelmingly in favor of far-left identity politics to sharply turning against them. Trends also have found that many younger male voters who supported President Donald Trump in 2024 have since said he failed to uphold his campaign promises, but express little enthusiasm for Democrats, either. 

“Anybody that’s been around in politics as long as I have, you make monumental mistakes — strategic mistakes,” Carville said on his podcast, Politics War Room.“ “Maybe the biggest one I made is I wrote a book saying the Democrats were destined to win for 40 more years because, look — we had the under-30s, we had non-White voters, and that was a growing coalition that would win elections.”

“It’s what I call ‘political Presbyterianism,’ that elections are ordained and you can just put something in a f—— computer and it’ll spit out the percent you’re going to get. It turned out that that was a really, really stupid assumption.”

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Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville said that young people comparing the Democratic Party to an HR department is a vindication of his warning against far-left identity politics. ((Photo by David Dee Delgado/Getty Images for The New York Times))

Carville argued that after the 2024 election, the media swung too far in the opposite direction — assuming Republican gains among young voters were permanent and repeating the same analytical mistake.

“It was the storyline after the 2024 election, was Trump had made significant gains among younger voters, particularly younger males, non-White males, and made significant Hispanic gains. The press made the mistake that we all make, that I made. We thought this was a permanent condition.”

John Della Volpe, the show’s guest for the episode, spoke about his extensive work with focus groups of young people. The key takeaway from the last 12 months since the election, he said, is that young men are not guaranteed to be Republican and young people in general are not guaranteed to be liberal. Young Americans, particularly those who are struggling, are open-minded to abandon their past beliefs and embrace whatever they believe will make their lives measurably better. 

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Carville has recently argued that politicians of either party need to embrace some level of economic populism to address young people’s struggles. (Jason Kempin/Getty Images for Politicon)

He later went on to note that in basically every focus group he has assembled lately, he has interacted with at least one person who has been homeless or is on the verge of it. He also noted two of the key terms young people associate with the Democratic Party.

“The number one word when we did an open-ended question, we coded a couple thousand of them. The number one word associated with Democrats was ‘weak,’” he said. “In focus groups, they say, you know, it’s the ‘HR department.'”

This comment resonated with Carville, who has warned time and time again that the Democrats have alienated people, particularly men, with far-left cultural identity politics.

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James Carville blasted the “identity movement” that the Democratic Party embraced over the last decade, warning they must “never repeat that mistake again.” (Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images for Amazon Studios)

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“When young people in focus groups talk about the HR department, that tells you how much of what a giant, self-inflicted stupid thing that this whole identity movement was, in all of its language and all of its bulls—,” the strategist said. “When you got people looking back at you saying, ‘that’s the HR department,’ that’s telling you something, and you should listen to it and never repeat that mistake again for the rest of your f—— lives.”