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Longtime Democratic consultant James Carville says Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker could potentially be his party’s best choice to lead Democrats to victory in the 2028 presidential election.
And Carville, who first gained national attention over three decades ago as the chief strategist for former President Bill Clinton’s 1992 White House victory, argues that former Vice President Kamala Harris doesn’t have a shot at winning the next Democratic presidential nomination.
The 2028 Democratic nomination battle in the race to succeed term-limited President Donald Trump is expected to draw a crowded and competitive field.
“If I had to say one guy… I’d take JD Pritzker,” Carville said this week in a sit-down interview with Fox News contributor Raymond Arroyo on his ‘Arroyo Grande’ podcast. Carville was asked which Democrat he could see carrying the flag into 2028.
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The billionaire governor, a member of the Pritzker family that owns the Hyatt hotel chain and who has started several of his own venture capital and investment startups, is running this year for a third term to steer Illinois.
And Pritzker, who has become a leading voice in the Democrats’ opposition to Trump and has taken steps to Trump-proof his solidly blue state, has made a handful of trips in recent years to the key early voting states in the race for the White House.
Carville noted that Pritzker “campaigns hard.”
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Asked about whether he could see Harris as the party’s standard-bearer in 2028, Carville responded, “She has no chance.”
Harris replaced then-President Joe Biden as the Democrats’ 2024 presidential nominee after Biden dropped his bid in July of that year, a month after a disastrous debate performance against Trump. Harris ended up losing the general election to Trump, who narrowly swept all seven key battleground states.
“No Democrat wants anything to do with anybody that had anything to do with 2024,” Carville emphasized, as he reasoned why Harris couldn’t win the 2028 nomination. He also questioned whether Harris, the nation’s first female and first Black vice president, had the ability to energize the Black community if she launched another White House run.
Carville said that the Democrats’ mantra heading into 2028 is “just win,” and argued that “if we nominate two white males, nobody’s going to give a s—.”
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He also doubted whether Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York would be a good 2028 nominee for the party.
Carville said the progressive champion and rising Democratic Party star “has talent, and she’s very smart.”
But he said that “the reason she is not going to work” is because “there’s a large part of the Democratic Party that like to feel smug.” Carville argued that Ocasio-Cortez and others on the progressive left of the party have alienated male voters.
“Democratic culture became very feminized and very judgmental and that’s why we pushed so many of the males away,” Carville said.
Asked by Fox News Digital if there’s anyone else he thinks is worth watching as a potential 2028 Democratic presidential contender, Carville mentioned former Louisiana Lt. Gov. and former New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu.
Landrieu mulled but ultimately decided against a 2020 White House and later served in the Biden administration.
Carville, pointing to “two huge mistakes that the Democratic Party made,” also blamed former President Barack Obama and Biden for Trump’s 2016 and 2024 White House wins.
Obama continued and implemented the unprecedented $700 billion Troubled Asset Relief Program, known as TARP, which was initiated by then-President George W. Bush at the very end of his White House tenure to stabilize the nation’s financial system after the 2008-2009 crisis.
The program prevented a total economic collapse, but was widely unpopular with voters.
“The mistake they made was not going after these bankers,” Carville said, as he pointed to moves by Obama and his administration. “We bailed them out.”
And Carville emphasized that “there is one person who is responsible for the election of Donald Trump in 2024, and it’s not Donald Trump, it’s Joe Biden.”
Carville argued that if Biden “would have gotten out in September of 2023, it wouldn’t have been close.”
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