‘The Stupidity’: James Carville Says Democrats Should Never Have Abandoned Rural Voters

James Carville, the renowned Democratic strategist who famously helped elect Bill Clinton to the White House in 1992, says his party has veered dangerously offtrack — and has abandoned the rural voting bloc Democrats need to win presidential elections.

The co-host of the “Politics War Room” podcast responded in Thursday’s episode to a listener who asked whether rural voters will be “hurt” by President Donald Trump’s international tariffs, and if now is “the time for Democrats to campaign hard in rural areas,” prompting Carville’s frustrated answer.

“I think it was always the time for Democrats to campaign hard in rural areas,” he replied.

“I don’t know how the party ever got away from that,” the longtime strategist continued. “Some of its more urbanist members and commentators lived in a folly of a world that we could exist in elections by just concentrating on large urban areas.”

Carville argued Democrats squandered an opportunity to galvanize rural voters ahead of the 2024 election, which saw Trump win the popular vote and Electoral College, and pleaded that members of the party must “reintroduce ourselves to rural America” before 2028.

The strategist went on to note that “large swaths” of Americans who don’t live in major metropolitan areas “feel like the Democratic Party doesn’t see them, doesn’t talk to them, or doesn’t prioritize them” — and launched into a tirade about that frustration.

“The stupidity of, ‘We got to be the most progressive, self-righteous, moralistic people in the world,’” Carville lamented Thursday. “And, you know, ‘People that live in rural America are just fat, lazy and stupid,’ which is decidedly not true.”

“But that’s the way that some of the urbanist elements of our party have tried to come across,” he continued. “And it’s stupid and they ought to apologize to the world for being so goddamn stupid.”

Harris performed worse in rural areas during the 2024 election than former President Joe Biden did in 2020, with organizers on the ground noting after her loss to Trump that the Harris campaign’s effort to reach those voters “just wasn’t enough.”

While neither she nor 2016 Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton publicly called rural voters “fat,” “lazy” or “stupid” as Carville suggested Democratic leaders have done, Clinton herself has said her description of Trump supporters as “deplorables” ahead of the 2016 election “handed him a political gift.”

Carville, who was “certain” Harris would defeat Trump, recently defended his reasoning.