Still furious about Vice President Kamala Harris’ and the Democratic Party’s crushing defeat on Election Day, party strategist James Carville wants to know how the Harris campaign and a major super PAC spent more than $2 billion.
On last week’s Politics War Room podcast, Carville demanded an audit of not only the campaign, but also the Future Forward super PAC. Another target: The Democratic National Committee (DNC).
The remarks came on the heels of Carville’s furious denunciation of the party for losing the vote of men with off-the-wall woke messaging and an obsession with identity politics.
Lies About Polling; $1.5 Billion Spent in 15 Weeks
Carville’s demand for the audit is yet another embarrassing blow to Harris, whose campaign staffers lied to top Democrats about internal election polls. While campaign insiders told Democrats and donors that Harris had a good chance of winning the election, the campaign internal polling showed otherwise.
“We were told definitely that she had a shot at winning — [but] it wasn’t even a shot,” said Lindy Li, a DNC Finance Committee member. “I was even told that Pennsylvania was looking good, that we would win 3-4 swing states.”
Li complained that the lie will harm the party’s fundraising efforts.
On top of that, the campaign spent $100 million a week for 15 weeks, a whopping $1.5 billion. Included in that massive expenditure were payolas to Harris backers in the far-left media in exchange for favorable interviews. Oprah Winfrey’s production company received $2.5 million in exchange for a town hall on national television. Al Sharpton’s National Action Network received $500,000, as The New American reported today, for a tongue-bath interview on far-left MSNBC.
“The biggest expense during the race was advertising,” The New York Times reported:
Between July 21 and Oct. 16, financial records show that the Harris campaign spent $494 million on producing and buying media, a category that includes both television and digital ads. The total sum through the election is said to be closer to $600 million. …
The ads were just one piece of a campaign that had enough cash to spend on seemingly everything. There was $2.5 million directed toward three digital agencies that work with online influencers, records show. The campaign spent around $900,000 to book advertising on the exterior of the Sphere venue in Las Vegas in the last week of the race, two officials said. There were drone shows in the sky before the debate in Philadelphia in September and at a Pittsburgh Steelers game in October.
Such was the campaign’s imprudent spending that it is now $20 million in debt, Li told NewsNation. “The internal strife and monetary confusion at the center of the party have led some staffers to leave altogether,” she said.
As well, the party’s leadership is “absolutely in turmoil,” Li said, and almost every party leader is “going to be gone.”
Damage “Almost Unfathomable”
No wonder Carville wants some green-eyeshade calculations.
Already enraged by the party’s radical messaging with such slogans as “defund the police,” Carville told leftist Al Hunt on Politics War Room that “the resistance is going to have trouble raising money. These fundraisers are burnt.”
Indeed, they’re more than “burnt.” He continued:
They’re really p***ed now. And the damage that the 2024 campaign has done, the damage that this decade has done to the Democratic brand is almost unfathomable, almost unfathomable.
But the campaign isn’t the only culprit in the party’s devastating defeat that will go under the bookkeeper’s gaze.
“We’re going to audit Future Forward,” the super PAC, Carville continued:
We’re going to audit the DNC so people can know.
But I’m telling you, without complete transparency — the campaign we think raised a billion and a half dollars, OK? We know that Future Forward, the last we saw, was $900 million, so we can assume that they got to a billion before the election. That’s two and a half freaking billion dollars.
Do you have any idea where that money went? Does anybody have any idea where that money went? I mean, I have some places I [can] start looking. …
I promise you this: The amount of money, and the amount of lobbyists that were involved in this campaign, is staggering.
Another Carville Warning
But Carville is just enraged about more than the ill-spent money. That didn’t cause the “the damage that this decade has done to the Democratic brand.”
Instead, that was the party’s obsession with woke ideology. It cost the party the vote of young men, particularly blacks and Hispanics, he said.
“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females” dominating the party, he told the Times’ Maureen Dowd in March:
“Don’t drink beer. Don’t watch football. Don’t eat hamburgers. This is not good for you.” The message is too feminine. …
If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR [National Public Radio] is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: ”Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?”
In April, Carville warned that black and Hispanic men are “leaving [the party] in droves.”
After President-elect Donald Trump shellacked Harris, Carville fumed to Dowd that “we could never wash off the stench of [wokeism].”
Formerly a torpedo for the Clinton Mafia, Carville has been warning for years that the party’s radical messaging has alienated voters.
H/T: The Hill
