James Carville and Mike Murphy

What  Democrats got wrong… What  Republicans got right… And what comes next… This week on Firing Line

 

TRUMP: I Donald John Trump…

 

Donald Trump is just the second American president to return to office after losing an election. He promised payback…

 

TRUMP: “I am your retribution….” 

 

…and he is moving aggressively to enact his agenda. 

 

Newscaster: Federal agents have been conducting raids in sanctuary cities across the U.S…

 

TAPPER: The new Trump administration has FIRED federal prosecutors who were involved in the criminal cases…

 

TRUMP: As of today, it will henceforth be the official policy of the United States government that there are only two genders: male and female.

 

Mike Murphy is a legendary Republican campaign consultant.  James Carville, equally legendary, advises Democrats. Both supported Kamala Harris in 2024, and both called it wrong. 

 

MURPHY: I think she’s going to win. I will predict it with low to medium confidence now. 

 

CARVILLE: I’m very comfortable with my prediction, my certainty that we’re going to win. ‘Cause we’re going to win, baby. We’re going to win this thing!

 

We brought them together on a stage at the University of Southern California to look back at the last election… and ahead to the next one. 

CARVILLE: MAGA-ism is not going to die with Trump. You got one hope, the Democratic Party

MURPHY: We’re going to disagree on this. I think MAGA is going to mutate.

As the two parties adjust to a new political reality, what do James Carville and Mike Murphy say now?

 

HOOVER: James Carville and Mike Murphy, welcome back to Firing Line.

MURPHY: Good to be here. 

HOOVER: We are less than two weeks into Trump’s second nonconsecutive term as president. He has, so far, pardoned rioters who assaulted police officers at the Capitol. He has tried to redefine birthright citizenship. He has fired Department of Justice prosecutors, inspectors general has threatened American allies and adversaries, and has tried to freeze spending that has already been appropriated by Congress. James, is this what you expected?

CARVILLE: Well, first of all, thank you. Of course it’s what I expected. And understand, this billionaire running the government where you have, you know, the top 1000, the top one percent that are coming in and running the government. And I think these people are deadly serious about ruining the government. Because if you ruin the federal government, there’s nobody that can regulate you. No one is going to control these people. 

HOOVER: Mike, we spoke last summer and at that time you cautioned Democrats to refrain from resorting to apocalyptic rhetoric in response to Trump. The policy moves, so far, in the first two weeks of the Trump administration, this Trump administration, are arguably vastly more consequential than the moves he made in the first two weeks of his last presidential administration. And yet, the tenor and the tone of the outrage has been dramatically muted this time around. No women’s march, no pink hats, no protests. Not like in 2017. Did they take your advice?

MURPHY: Well, I don’t think they did during the campaign. My argument then was, whining about stuff from the Democrat or Washington establishment is rocket fuel for Trump. Now that Trump’s in power, though– You know, look at Trump’s record. He’s a very good challenger. ‘Oh, everything’s screwed. You’re an angry shoe salesman. Every, you know, it’s like, I’ll go get all your enemies.’ He’s very bad at getting reelected because once he gets in the government, it’s – I agree with James – it’s a disaster. And it looks like this time he doesn’t have some of the old semi-grownups around him. So he’s just having his fantasy football. It’s like a kid you give a laser sword to. And so I think it is time for Democratic outrage. But it’s not something. Keep in mind, people were–

HOOVER: So the apocalypse starts now?

MURPHY: Well, no, but this stuff has to have a price. I mean, they’ve got a blitz strategy. Hit them with everything. Half of these things are just press releases. The other half are real bad and real terrible. A lot of them won’t, over time, get legal, you know, support. But their strategy is just to keep throwing punches and say, ‘I’m the action man. I’m fighting all your enemies.’ Now, he was elected to fix the economy. So let’s see how a trade war gets down to that. So I think he’s on kind of a shot clock and I think he’s going to hit the rocks over time. But the question is how much damage can he do?

HOOVER: But what do you make of the muted response though, the muted opposition, both of you.

MURPHY: They’re all in therapy. But I think I think it’ll come. I wish it would start tomorrow. They should have–.

HOOVER: James are you in therapy?

MURPHY: –grabbed Rahm Emanuel for DNC. They need a warrior.

HOOVER: I mean, are they all in therapy? Where is the opposition?

CARVILLE: Well, I mean, sometimes, you know, if some of you old people remember Muhammad Ali and rope-a-dope? He’d go like 6 or 7 rounds and he’d knock you out. And sometimes you have to do what’s called strategic patience. Trump floods it with 20 different things. You can’t swing at every pitch. And I think it’s like– well you’re right, we don’t have the million-women march. We ran a presidential election– If we were planning a Super Bowl, we started our seventh-string quarterback. That’s what happened. Okay, let’s– you can’t address a problem unless you are honest about a problem. And none of this was inevitable. Never should have happened. It was not inevitable that– Joe Biden stands over this disaster like a colossus. And he just does, you can’t– he’s a great guy. ‘James you shouldn’t say that.’ He’s a wonderful man. Who cares! If you don’t win a goddamn election you’ve done nothing. Zip, de nada. You don’t count. I don’t care how good a man you are. And till Democrats learn that and quit keeping their head in the cloud and talking goofy language that no one else talks. We got to be nice to people. Screw that! Run over ‘em.

MURPHY: You know, in the Republican Party, in our consulting world, we used to joke a lot because the Democratic nomination process is mostly proportional delegates. Our process is winner-take-all. So if you lose, you’re dead fast. And why do they do it that way? Well, they love losers. ‘Fifth place? Oh, get a delegate.’ You know, so this is, I totally agree with James on this. They made a dumb bet for internal incentive reasons, and they blew the election when the stakes couldn’t be higher.

HOOVER: Last summer when I spoke to both of you, you were both optimistic the Democrats would turn the presidential race around with Biden off the ticket.

MURPHY: Right. They could have.

CARVILLE: Yeah.

HOOVER: Okay. So let’s just take this in two parts. First, you just said this, sort of intimated this all lies at the feet of Joe Biden. If Biden had bowed out gracefully with enough time, if there had been some kind of a primary, which you argued in The New York Times after the disastrous debate. But what if he had done it in 2023?

CARVILLE: We’d  have won the presidency by about– we would’ve gotten 53 and a half. Understand, we were running in a 70% wrong-track country that doesn’t like Trump. And we resolutely refused to give them change. They actually asked Harris, ‘What would you do differently?’ She said, ‘I can’t think of anything.’ Now, if you were to put the staggering talent that exists in today’s Democratic Party– You heard what I said, the ‘staggering talent’ that exists in today’s Democratic Party, and people would have seen that, they’d have gone, ‘Shit  I didn’t know they had people like that, can actually complete a sentence.’ Ok? That actually can know how to frame a message, that actually have a sense of accomplishment of doing something. We would have excited people and we would have had people from the middle of the country, we would have had people from the coasts, we would have been diverse, we’d have been– And then, when you do that, that’s how people get involved in politics. We have not had an inspirational presidential candidate since 2012. That’s a problem.

MURPHY: When you have a primary and a contest, like the playoffs, you get a big winner. And that credentials the nominee. They earn it. James suggested early, and I was a thousand percent for this, we can have a short primary here instead of anointing somebody. And I got called to, like, a secret meeting with a bunch of senior White House people after the terrible Biden debate with some other non-Trump, you know, Trump-opposing Republicans. And I said, this Carville thing is right. Go do a mini– You know, let Whitmer go beat somebody. Or if Kamala is that good, let her beat somebody to make her somebody. Not just an appointment. She was nominated on a telephone conference call.

HOOVER: That said, you were both optimistic. So tell me, is there one thing in hindsight, that Kamala Harris, this campaign, could have done differently that might have changed the outcome in your view? Both of you.

MURPHY: I’ll give you a small one. I think they totally blew Michigan. Now their national problems that hurt them everywhere hurt them there, too. Trump spent $30 million in a state I’ve done a lot of work in—saying, ‘Screw these electric cars. She’s going to, you know, ruin the auto industry.’ Truth is there are 50,000 new jobs. Nobody told him that. I took a poll ten days out in Michigan. Two to one people thought electric cars are bad for the auto industry. What’s bad is China wiping out the whole auto industry in ten years. So they gave Michigan away. And I know the on-the-ground people in the campaign all think, I don’t know who these clowns were. A lot of their messaging still didn’t do meat and potatoes economics. You don’t do outrage against Trump because half the country thinks the problem with democracy is Trump. The other half thinks the problem with democracy is woke Democrat, blah, blah, blah. Instead, you say, ‘He’s going to screw you. He’s going to make stuff cost more.’ You know, you get at the meat and potatoes stuff, and I thought they were bad at that.

HOOVER: Is there anything, one thing, Kamala could have done differently, James, that might have changed the outcome?

CARVILLE: Yes. First of all, she got Joe Biden’s campaign. That’s it. They just gave– she got the keys. They got the same manager, same strategist, same headquarters, same artwork, same computer system, same bathroom. Okay. That is not good. You don’t even have your own people. Then, you can’t have lobbyists running presidential campaigns. So they said we can’t run on a minimum wage. And minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 2009. It’s $7.25. We couldn’t say we’re going to do away with tax breaks for people who make over 400,000 and take that money and help young people buy a house, or get an education, or rent a house, because we were all conflicted. people say, ‘You think she should move to the left? You think she should move to the right?’ Shit,  move to like, giving people a raise. What is that? That’s what people want! Give them something. We refused to do that.

HOOVER: Okay. You’re getting at–  What we know happened in the election is that, you know, Republicans held the House, Republicans flipped the Senate, county by county across the country, the country shifted rightward. The conventional wisdom is that Democrats have a deeper problem here. And you wrote an op-ed in The New York Times, James, said, actually what has to happen is, you know, it’s the economy, stupid. Go big, go populist. What populism should the Democrats pursue?

CARVILLE: Raise the minimum wage. 

MURPHY: Yeah.

CARVILLE: Raise taxes of people that earn over $400,000 a year. Reinvest in small-town and rural America. Anything! More vocational education. Health care is an issue. People are getting destroyed by health care costs. Okay. What about mass transit? People work and people have to take the bus to subway to work. Okay. What about that? There’s a million things right in front of you that you can do to show people that you’re in their lives. So we sit there and we tell people how good the economy is. Meanwhile, you got these kids here paying, you know, $300,000 for an education. They go out to try to buy a goddamn house. They look at 7.5% interest. And I got these assholes in Washington telling me how good I have it? 

MURPHY: I think the key way to look at it is Trump is not a conservative, he’s a populist. He’s an applause line guy. And you can’t fight populism without other populism, ’cause the applause lines will win in the end. You know, ‘Oh, I’ll put a tariff on them. Now all the problems are solved. I’ll make the problem go away. It’s not you, it’s them.’ And there is a friendly middle class populism the Democrats do. Minimum wage is a great example. And instead, there was a little bit of sophistication to the Democratic campaign. And when you’re running against Donald Trump in the 70% wrong track where everybody wants to fire the president because they think he’s senile and screwed up the economy, which hurts what stuff costs, which is the cash register, everybody, every voter has to deal with every week, you don’t get sophisticated. You know, you, it’s your populism versus theirs. And she didn’t have any.

HOOVER: Okay, so then if both parties are increasingly focused on populist messaging moving forward, you have President Trump and Vice President Vance with a group of Republicans that have centered their pitch, their populist pitch around culture war issues: highlighting wokeness, immigration, border security, crime. Can an economically focused center-left populism, Mike, compete with the culture war driven right-wing populism?..

MURPHY: Yeah, I mean, rule one for the Democrats is, the culture war stuff is bait. The Trump guys love a DEI fight. Are you kidding? It’s, ‘What? We don’t have enough transsexuals in the Marine Corps?’ By the way. I’m fine with all the DEI stuff. But in politics, when you pick the right fight, you’re winning. And the Dems always go for the bait. So yeah, economic Democratic…. ‘Cause keep in mind here’s what’s going to happen. Trump is a salesman, all right? He’s sold them a condo. The condo was, ‘The economy was better when I was president. The senile old guy can’t do anything about it. The woke San Francisco liberal can’t. She’s going to be paying for sex changes in prison.’ So I’m going to go beat up on these foreigners who are cheating at trade, blah, blah, blah, and save your life.’ It’s a pretty good pitch. It worked. It’s worked for him twice. But now he’s got to run the store. They have already turned off a lot of popular programs because they put out an executive order without legal review because they’ve got some dummies there, by the way. They aren’t all masterminds. And then they had to do a 180 on that. You know, they beat up Colombia. Wow. Great victory. Now we’re going to put tariffs on Denmark, arguably our best small NATO ally to steal Greenland, which, by the way, we don’t want? Trump just saw a map and thought ‘Big as Texas. I can get it for free.’ You know, so the point is– And the Democrats, even as terrible as they are because I don’t think they’ve learned the populist lesson. You know, right now they’re all building dream catchers and sobbing. Eventually, they will get a General Patton and they will fight back. And Trump’s under a clock because the midterm elections, even if the Democrats screw up, they’re likely to win. And so Trump’s on a long leash now, doing a lot of damage. But they will, I hope, figure this out and start fighting.

HOOVER: On the cultural issues. James, more than half of men under 30 supported Trump in this election. And you raised concerns about preachy women in the Democratic Party.

CARVILLE: Yeah. Yeah.

HOOVER: Who are the preachy women? 

CARVILLE: You would have to have your head in the clouds to not know that Democratic messaging comes across to ordinary people as haughty, coded and superior sounding. Period. End of argument. I call it identitarianism. And identitarianism tells me that I should look at you more for your identity than your humanity, and I can’t do that. I cannot look at you first as anything other than a human being.

MURPHY: I have to say, identity has taken over the Democratic Party internal politics. It doesn’t help them win elections. I’d fire everybody at the DNC who can tell me what intersectionalism is, and I’d move it to Kansas City. 

HOOVER: A Bloomberg analysis of the nine most popular YouTube programs that interviewed Donald Trump before the election found his appearances received more than 100 million views. Nearly all of the top political guests on these programs were Republicans and Trump supporters. This is the Joe Rogan Experience, the Sean Ryan Show, the Full Send Podcast, 80% male audiences that regularly echo Trump’s talking points on the economy, immigration, on gender. A large segment of the electorate is marinating in a media ecosystem where the audience is mostly male, the discussion often celebrates masculinity. Is this your father’s GOP?

MURPHY: No. No. That’s why I’m here screaming about the president of the United States who’s a Republican. I’m a conservative. I’m a right-wing nut, but I’m a conservative. I’m not whatever Trump is. You’re right about– You know, when you asked what the biggest tactical mistakes were–  Not doing the Rogan interview– And by the way, the idea that Rogan is the new Tim Russert with the trick questions and the tough journalism, it’s not true. He’s a nice guy who, you know, just does kind of a conversation. He has a few opinions that you can push back on. 

HOOVER: Yeah. 

MURPHY: You know, so we are in a new world where some of the old elite gatekeepers are gone, for good and bad. 

HOOVER: Yeah.

MURPHY: But if people doing campaigns don’t represent there are other channels now where you can get a lot of message out for free. The people who trust those channels, even if you can argue with credible fact that there’s misstatements of truth, blah, blah, blah. They trust them because they’re not part of the big establishment that everybody hates. Populism, again. 

HOOVER: Mike…

MURPHY: So they made an idiotic mistake not doing it. It was moronic.

HOOVER: You have been an outspoken critic of Donald Trump for more than a decade. You led a superPAC supporting Jeb Bush in 2016. You endorsed Biden in 2020. Trump has led Republicans back to control of the White House for a second time. Congress also entirely, really, in his grip, one might say. He’s expanded the share of the black vote, Hispanic vote, young voters. Your personal feelings aside, can Republicans win without Trump on the top of the ticket?

MURPHY: Oh hell, yes. 

HOOVER: Well…

MURPHY: You know, but let me say.

HOOVER: What is your evidence?

MURPHY: Trump has led us– Because we used to do it all the time.

HOOVER: Yeah, but we’re in a new era.

MURPHY: Well, yeah. Everything’s a new era till the new new era comes. Trump has led us to victory in presidentials, and he’s wiped our party out in off years. So he’s got a mixed record on that. And we’re seeing how we do in 18 months, the great referendum on Trump 2. We’ll see who holds the House. I… Yes, I think a modernized conservatism can win. But both parties are captured by the primary vote. So in our world, in the primary, are a whole bunch of people who know what it would be like to be in Vichy Paris, because they’re all telling me in their basement, ‘We’re going to, you know, take it back.’ But they’re all terrified because Trump can wipe them out in a primary.

HOOVER: Let’s talk about where we are now.

MURPHY: So we’re stuck. But give it time.

HOOVER: Well, where we are now is, you know, some folks on the right and the Republican Party view that there’s really two factions, dominant factions within the Republican Party. There’s this pro-business wing that wants deregulation, that wants tax cuts. They frankly rely on immigration. And then there is the more sort of radical, populist, MAGA-adjacent crew, the Steve Bannon adjacent crew that is both anti-immigration and also anti abortion.

MURPHY: Right. And not so big on the Constitution either, by the way.

HOOVER: Yeah, you know, debatable. So we’ve already seen these two factions clash over H-1b visas. How do you predict this dynamic will play out as the Trump administration unfolds?

MURPHY: Well, if you… H-1b visas is a great example. You’ve got kind of the Trump old guard versus Elon Musk and some of the techno types. I think Trump and Elon are two tomcats in one pillow sack and it’s going to end very badly, is my prediction. Who knows? Been wrong before. But right now, the populists are in ascent. So the question is, are we going to have a reformation or not? And the key to that is, will Trump have long term political success over the next three years or failure?

HOOVER: James, how…

MURPHY: Because parties are going to do what they think works.

HOOVER: Do Democrats capitalize on a clash like this?  I mean, is there an inevitable clash that then Democrats can capitalize… 

CARVILLE: Okay, let’s back up.

HOOVER: Back up.

CARVILLE: First of all, this mythology that y’all have that there’s a split in the Republican Party. There is no split in the Republican Party! It’s all Trump! Okay, get over it. Mitt Romney is not walking through that door. MAGA-ism is not going to die with Trump. It’s just going to breed more and more. And Mitt Romney is gone. 

MURPHY: We’re going to disagree on this. I think MAGA is going to mutate, and I don’t know what the mutations will be going forward.

HOOVER: In every program I select a clip of William F. Buckley Junior. In a particular episode Richard Nixon appears with Buckley. And Nixon argues that, at least in 1967, voters have lost confidence with the Democratic Party and their ability to govern. 

NIXON: I would say, too, that last year in terms of the way the parties presented their cases across the country to the people, the Democratic Party seemed to be the party of the past. They were applying the various programs from the thirties to the problems of the sixties, whereas the Republican Party seemed to be more in tune with what people believed in now.”

HOOVER: Is that at play today, James, on some level, at the state level, at the local level? Democrats seem to be faced with a similar skepticism about their ability to address people’s concerns. I say that in Los Angeles, where one of the largest natural disasters has occurred in the state in recent times, and there is a massive feeling that the Democratic establishment has not been able to be prepared to address basic people’s concerns. Is that at play?

CARVILLE: First of all, there are highly competent Democratic governors all over the country. Democratic mayors control cities that probably account for 70% of the total GDP in the United States. If you look at the first two years of the Biden administration, would anybody say that Nancy Pelosi is ineffective? I don’t think so. Look at the stuff they did. Look at what Obama did. Where do you think 23 million people got their health care from? Not from a talking point. But actually winning election and executing a policy. That happened. 

MURPHY: I got to say, here in Los Angeles, where I live, and in Californian politics where I work, there is a competence crisis. And I mean, we’re in a situation here where we had 90 fire trucks and ambulances in a boneyard because they laid off the mechanics. And, you know, I mean, voters here of every party are hopping mad. And so I think that is going to shape California politics now for a few years. Less ideological dogma and more, the folks running things here can’t run things.

CARVILLE: If you can’t run a railroad, you got to get out. 

MURPHY: Yep.

CARVILLE: But there are a lot of Democrats out there running a pretty tight railroad.

HOOVER: All right. Mike Murphy, James Carville, thank you for joining me on Firing Line. 

MURPHY: Thank you. 

[applause]