Veteran political strategist James Carville suggested early Tuesday that the Democratic Party needs to do a deep dive into where people get their information and, beyond that, how to retain voters.
“We don’t know how people get their information. I’m 80. To me, the whole world is the Times, the Post, the nets, cable TV,” said Carville, who supported Vice President Harris during the campaign.
“It dawned on me, we don’t do anything,” he told host Greg Sargent on The New Republic’s “The Daily Blast” podcast. “So, what I’m trying to do, Greg, is to get people interested and get the right people to do an exhaustive, detailed, well-fielded, well-constructed survey on media consumption.”
Democrats have been searching for answers after Republicans secured majorities in the House, Senate and White House earlier this month.
For some, the party’s woes revolve around ineffective messaging on kitchen-table economic issues, such as inflation, wages and the accelerating trend of wealth inequality. For others, the trouble stems from the explosive debate over the Israel-Hamas war.
For still others, the problems relate to culture war battles, including LGBTQ issues such as transgender rights.
Carville, who served as a senior adviser to former President Clinton, mentioned a conversation that he had with a political consultant who conducted focus groups with Black voters in Milwaukee.
“They’re on TikTok,” Carville noted.
When asked by Sargent about doing a “very deep and comprehensive dive” into how people get their information among the voting blocs that Democrats lost, the strategist said that he wants to go beyond polling.
“It’s also, ‘How do we retain the voters that we have?’” said Carville, a staunch critic of President-elect Trump, adding that when exit surveying is over, he thinks the party will be surprised.
“When this is done — I feel confident that eventually it’s going to be done — we’re all going to be surprised. It’s a hard survey to field,” the strategist continued. “There’s so many different news sources that people have. You can’t do the standard pick from one.”
“My guess is that when the books are written about this election, the Trump people had a better understanding of who they were talking to, how they were talking to, and again, what medium you talk to people through,” he added.
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