James Carville says Democrats need to stop letting Bernie Sanders and AOC define the party
Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville argued on Thursday's episode of the "Politics War Room" podcast that the Democratic Party would be better off if "people like Bernie Sanders and AOC" were no longer defining it.
Carville claimed that Democrats have candidates who are "staggeringly more talented" than Sen. Bernie Sanders, D-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., and it's time to start getting these alternative candidates in front of voters.
Meanwhile, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have been gaining influence through their "Fighting Oligarchy" tour across the country, quickly becoming the face of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.
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Ocasio-Cortez has yet to make her presidential ambitions known, but many politicos, including FiveThirtyEight founder and prominent pollster Nate Silver, are predicting that she will be the Democratic Party's nominee in the 2028 election.
The 80-year-old Democratic strategist emphasized the party's deep talent pool that they should be showcasing to help redefine its identity.
"There's truly depth and talent in the Democratic Party and the faster that we can get them on the field and people seeing them, and the sooner we can get people like Bernie Sanders and AOC not defining who the party is, the better off we're going to be," Carville argued.
Carville half-heartedly invited Ocasio-Cortez and Sanders to run for the White House in 2028, but asserted that there are far more "talented" and "articulate" candidates out there for Democrats to run.
"If AOC wants to run for president or wants to put her name on the ballot, let her come. Bernie Sanders, run twice and lost two times. Maybe he wants to take a crack a third time. I have no problem with that," Carville said, adding, "But be sure we get, who, in my opinion, are staggeringly more acceptable, staggeringly more talented, staggeringly more articulate candidates out there."
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Tensions between Carville and Ocasio-Cortez have been simmering recently, notably after a spat last month which grew after Carville claimed the party had a "preachy female" problem.
"A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females," Carville said in an interview with a New York Times columnist on self-defeating messaging that he claimed was prevalent in his party. "’Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.’"
He continued: "The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’"
"Maybe he should start a podcast about it," Ocasio-Cortez wrote in a post on X. "I hear men are really underrepresented in that space."
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Fox News' Gabriel Hays and Jeffrey Clark contributed to this report.