Democratic strategist James Carville on Thursday said it is absurd to suggest Democrats “feel disenfranchised” by the process that made Vice President Harris the party’s presumptive nominee.
Harris has secured enough verbal backing from delegates to become the party’s presumptive nominee after President Joe Biden exited the campaign on Sunday. Carville on “The World Over with Raymond Arroyo” claimed there are virtually no voters who are angered with the process of Harris becoming the de facto nominee.
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“Name me one unhappy Democratic primary voter … Raymond, this is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard,” Carville told host Raymond Arroyo. “You think that Democrats, that somebody said, ‘Gee, I feel unheard. I voted for President Biden in the Indiana primary and now they’re going with Vice President Harris.’ I mean, come on.”
“I know more Democratic donors than most anybody. And there was an entire donor boycott. They can’t count the money coming in,” he added. “They had 808,000 new contributions, 60% were first-time donors. People are announcing, I saw Reed Hastings, who’s a friend of mine, like $7.5 million. So if you can find one donor that feels kind of left out of it, so what? Who cares? I have not seen a Democrat or heard a Democrat say, ‘I feel disrespected and disenfranchised.’ No one.”
Arroyo brought up how Black Lives Matter (BLM) pushed the Democratic National Committee to organize a nationwide virtual primary after Harris secured sufficient delegates, suggesting the process was not democratic.
“Who says BLM is a major part of the Democratic Party? I’ve been a Democrat all my life. How many BLM delegates are there? I mean, there’s this whole mythology that Republicans have of who Democrats are,” Carville said. “And, you know, y’all want to live in your mythical world. I can’t take you out of it. You’ve been in it for a long time. But I can assure you there’s no Democrats that feel disenfranchised by this. You might be able to find one donor or one person, but I’ll tell you, 98% are totally on board.”
Carville on July 8 wrote in a New York Times op-ed that he wanted the Democratic Party to host four town halls throughout the United States until its August convention to help choose a nominee, with former Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton playing a major role in them. The Democratic strategist earlier in the episode with Arroyo acknowledged he would have preferred “a more open process” than how Harris became the de facto nominee.
Progressive Wisconsin voters in an MSNBC segment that aired Thursday voiced their dissatisfaction with the process enabling Harris to become the presumptive nominee, but they asserted they plan to vote for her in the November election.
“I think by trying to clear the field and ensure that it was going to be Biden and… not allow us to have an actual democratic primary process — I’m not saying I think Kamala Harris is going to lose, but I do think that we would have been benefited significantly if he had figured this out far sooner so there could have actually been more time to have an internal debate, have internal democracy within the party,” a male voter said.
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