Democratic Senator James Carville took the drastic step of telling major party donors to stop giving to politicians who still support President Biden after his poor performance in last week’s debate.
Carville, a veteran strategist who helped Bill Clinton win the 1992 presidential election, mentioned Biden’s plummeting approval ratings during a conference call with dozens of wealthy Democratic donors earlier this week. According to Semaphore.
“Seventy-two percent of people want something different. Why not give it to them?” Carville reportedly said on the conference call.
When one deep-pocketed donor asked, “What can I do as a donor to encourage a change in the list of candidates?” the 79-year-old “Ragin’ Cajun” had a ready response.
“I want to say, ‘If they don’t do something about this, I’ll block their calls on my mobile phone,'” he said, according to the media.
The donors, along with Carville, fellow former Clinton strategist Paul Begala and Dmitry Melhorn, a top adviser to billionaire LinkedIn founder and major Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, spent an hour discussing Biden’s precarious future.
“If you woke Joe Biden up at 3 a.m. and asked him who the president is, would he be able to get the answer right?” one donor wondered aloud.
“The fact that President Biden continues to be at the top of the list of candidates gives people an excuse to vote for Donald Trump,” another contributor said.
But Melhorn countered that Vice President Kamala Harris is “more of a threat to the swing vote than Joe Biden being dead or in a coma,” referring to the front-runner to succeed Biden.
“So if Joe has to go, Kamala’s going to go,” he summarized. “And if it’s Kamala, it’s going to be a lot harder.”
Still, Carville stuck by donors who give to American Bridge, the Democratic super PAC that provides much of the party’s opposition research and advertising targeted at Trump.
“We’re probably going to look back on this and say, ‘This was the best thing that ever happened to us,'” he told the wealthy donors, some of whom called from vacation.
“If this had happened on Oct. 5, we would have been more than just bruises and sprains and tattoos,” Carville said. “Maybe this will be the catalyst for something different.”
The longtime strategist made no secret of his pessimism about Biden’s candidacy.
He had already predicted that the president would withdraw from the race, and in return, the Biden campaign sent out a flood of fundraising text messages mentioning Carville’s name without his signature, forcing him out.
