James Carville Says Dems Should Give Up on Florida

One reality the midterm elections made clear is that Florida is no longer purple. From Gov. Ron DeSantis’s landslide victory on down, Republicans dominated on Tuesday. The landscape is now so bleak for the Left going forward that longtime Democrat strategist James Carville advised his party to look to potentially greener pastures.

“It’s not as many electoral votes, but I think Democrats might be better off looking harder at Mississippi than Florida,” he told MSNBC’s Joy Reid on Thursday. 

Mississippi has six electoral votes in the Electoral College compared to Florida, which now boasts 30 after gaining a vote from the 2020 Census results, according to NPR.

Carville said the Democratic Party could have better luck engaging black voters in Louisiana as well to try to turn both those states.

JAMES CARVILLE: The Louisiana state [Democratic] Party has had a very difficult time in the last year, I’ll leave it at that.

You have to understand, Louisiana has about 33% black total population. It’s very rare, if we could get the black contribution to 33 (that never happens, or seldom happens) we’d be in a lot better position. A state that interests me a lot is Mississippi which is 37, maybe 38% black, it only votes 30. If you got your staff from 30 to 38, that’s a lot of votes.

And we don’t lose that bad in Mississippi, not that big. It’s not as many electoral votes, but we might be better off looking harder at Mississippi than Florida. I don’t know that. I’m just throwing a riff off the top of my head. But it’s been very frustrating. I think some of our previous consultants you had on, I’ve been trying to tell some of these big fundraisers, the massive GOTV, massive voter registrations in the Mississippi delta, the Louisiana delta.

Most of the black folks in my part of the world live close to the river, where i grew up was probably 80% black, I grew up right on the river. I think consultants are making some good points, but we’ve got to be realistic here.

If we can just get a good share of the vote up to our share of the population, that would help. We would have probably won in North Carolina. We would have to do the math. (Transcript via RCP)

In addition to DeSantis’s win of all but five of Florida’s 67 counties, including historically blue Miami-Dade County, Sen. Marco Rubio won re-election, the GOP swept all statewide races, and Republicans gained supermajorities in the state House and Senate. 

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