Former Clinton advisor James Carville is not having a good election season. The longtime Democratic strategist is growing increasingly intense in his attempts to get the attention of his party.
Young voters from minority communities, previously one of the Democratic party’s most dependable voting blocks, are leaving “in droves,” according to the man who’s fiery temperament and astute political mind long ago earned him the nickname “The Rajin’ Cajun.”
The situation has Carville, to all appearances, bordering on panic.
According to the New York Post, he’s called the bleed of young minority voters from the party “horrifying” on his podcast “Carville’s Classroom.” The bleed is worst among young black and latino voters, and worse still among the men from these groups.
Rather than a gradual shift in interest alignment, the situation is acute, and it’s accelerating. According to Gallup polls only a year ago, two thirds of black adults either identified as Democrat or leaned that way, while only 19% confessed to Republican voting patterns. The 47-point spread in that poll is lower than that revealed by any poll in a quarter-century. Even in 2020, black voters broke 77% to 11% in favor of the Democratic party.
The situation among Hispanics is similar, with last year’s Gallup poll found 47% of Hispanics identifying as Democrats while 35% claimed to be Republican, a marked drop from 2012 when Hispanic voters broke 57% to 26% in favor of the Democrats.
The last few years have seen the worst inflation since the late 1970s, the Covid pandemic, skyrocketing Federal debt, rising interest rates, and a major ongoing border crisis, all in addition to the highly publicized and expensive aid packages to Ukraine for the war against Russia. The effect of all of these on the working class—not to mention the discomfort these conservative groups feel with wokeness—seems to be eroding the Democratic stranglehold. Biden’s chances in 2024 are dim without them.
