Political strategist and commentator James Carville blamed Vice President Kamala Harris loss due to her party’s inability to distance itself from “woke era” politics.

Democrats have suffered a difficult series of defeats in recent days, with Donald Trump securing a second term. Meanwhile, the Republican Party has regained control of the Senate and now appears poised for a majority in the House of Representatives. Many from both sides of the aisle have since engaged in postmortems of Harris’ campaign, trying to put their finger on the factors that has led to this shift.

Peter Loge, former senior adviser to Barack Obama, said this Newsweek that America had entered the “I knew it all along” phase of “post-campaign expertise.”

During the most recent episode of his Political war room podcast, Carville outlined the “big, big mistakes” he said the Democratic Party made in the 2024 presidential election.

Carville said what “killed” Democrats in this election was a “sense of dishonor” among the electorate, part of which, he said, was “the unfortunate events of what I would call the woke age.”

“We got over it,” he said. “But the image stuck in people’s minds that Democrats wanted to defund the police, empty prisons… it created a sense of dishonor.”

Carville also cited the party’s initial support for President Joe Biden’s reelection and the process of choosing another candidate after his withdrawal in July.

“Because Biden stayed in so late, we didn’t have any process,” Carville said. “We had all this unused (talent) on the sidelines.”

Carville commented on Harris’ almost instantaneous rise to the top of the party, bypassing the competitive nomination process that candidates must traditionally go through. This decision, criticized by some as undemocratic, is being touted by others as contributing to the vice president’s eventual defeat.

“If we had had an open process, it would have been much better,” Carville added. “It could have been worse, but it could also have been a lot better.”

Carville, who coined the axiom “It’s the economy, stupid” prior to Bill Clinton’s victory in the 1992 election, also cited inflation as an additional “sign of shame” for voters.

Despite occasionally expressing disapproval of elements of her strategy, Carville had been a crusader for Harris throughout the election and was one of the most prominent voices predicting her victory.

In his opinion piece of October 23 for The New York Times“Three reasons why I am confident Kamala Harris will win,” Carville wrote: “America, it will all be okay. Mrs. Harris will be elected the next President of the United States. I am sure of that.”

As evidence, Carville mentioned the ‘losing streak’ the Republican Party, including Trump, had to contend with Harris’ fundraising ability and his own political instincts since 2018 –“It’s just a feeling.”

One of Carville’s other statements during Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign was that elections were won and lost on the promise of “change versus more of the same.” He said the Harris team had not paid attention to this “fundamental foundation of politics.”

“Change is what wins elections,” Carville said before citing a recent NBC News poll that found 65 percent of registered voters viewed the country as “on the wrong track.”

“In a country with 65 percent wrong track, we offered people the same track,” Carville said.

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