Carville warns Democrats to avoid talking about trans athletes in women's sports, defunding the police
Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville warned the Democratic Party Thursday it should refrain from talking about transgender athletes competing in women's sports and defunding law enforcement agencies.
During Thursday’s episode of "Politics War Room," a listener asked Carville and his co-host, Al Hunt, why Democrats have not been able to create effective messaging like the Trump campaign did in 2024 with an ad depicting then-Vice President Harris supporting sex changes for inmates.
"We're not as disciplined as they are, and I think that they know their crap is unpopular, so they got to be more disciplined in how they portray things," Carville said.
"But I think the Supreme Court is probably going to rule on this trans athlete issue, which will probably take it off the table a little bit more than it was.
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"We didn’t get our messaging right on this whole thing, I have to say that," Carville said. "I think that we have done, because of this flubbing it, we've actually done more harm to trans people than we would have wanted to. It hasn't been very ineffective, our messaging on this."
"Let me raise a different messaging issue," Hunt interjected. "I don't want any Democrats out there talking about ‘abolishing ICE.’ You talk about ‘reforming ICE.' You talk about ‘making ICE work.’ You don't — I mean, we should have learned that lesson last time. When you say ‘abolishing ICE,’ you know what they're going to say? 'You want them pouring across the borders.'
"And what you want to do in immigration is go back to the Obama policy, a tough border policy with a pathway to citizenship. Don't talk about abolishing ICE."
Carville, who often urges Democrats to stay away from the fringes of the left, said the "three stupidest words in the history of the English language" are "defund the police."
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"The left is universally wrong about everything," Carville said, adding that ICE has flaws and needs to be reformed.
"Some of these ICE agents are dedicated law enforcement professionals. I'll be the first to admit that. Although I suspect it might be a smaller percent than you imagine. And a lot of them are just a pack of people that couldn't get a job anywhere else that figured they got a chance with not very much training to carry a badge and a gun and shoot people," Carville claimed.
"And … that's the real danger. The danger is not that we have an immigration and customs force. We need that. The danger is we don't have a necessarily expert workforce dealing with that at all, and it needs to be exposed about training and the backgrounds and the tests and the social media scrubs and everything else we do before we hire these people."
ICE didn't immediately respond to a request for comment.