James Carville is one of the few instantly recognizable political strategists. Carville, who turns 80 in October, has spent decades running campaigns (most famously Bill Clinton’s in 1992) and advising candidates while playing pundit on TV and himself in movies. More recently, he has warned his party about the perils of nominating President Biden a second time. A new documentary, Carville: Winning Is Everything, Stupid, which recently premiered at the Telluride Film Festival, chronicles his fight to get Biden off the ballot, but also serves as a career retrospective for a Democratic fixture. I spoke with Carville about the coin-toss 2024 election, what Kamala Harris needs to do in Tuesday’s debate, and a missing sense of fun in politics.

You recently wrote a New York Times op-ed where you outlined three things Harris should do to beat Trump. One of them is “Break from President Biden on policy.” And she does seem to be separating herself from him a little bit, proposing a smaller tax hike on the rich and emphasizing cost of living stuff more. But these are pretty minor differences. Do you think it’s enough?
She’s going to need some more, but it doesn’t have to be anything major. There’s plenty of opportunities. But she can’t run as a continuation candidate, and that’s the point.

She’s been pretty vague actually on policy altogether, except for-
So what? To be honest with you, I think campaigns are not about specifics but about direction.

A good slogan will do the work of 20 policies.
Anything that you put out, somebody’s going to say, “Well, this is not totally workable, or you’re not going to get it off in Congress.” All truth. But there’s a lot of research that says you should pay attention to what candidates say in an election, because they generally get about 75% of it done. It might not be exactly the same proposal, but the best barometer of what a president will do has traditionally been to listen to the campaign stump speech. And there’s a lot of academic research to back that up.

And that makes you want them to say less?
I would say “direction,” okay? We’re going to travel west, but I can’t tell you if we’re heading 270 or 260 or 280. But generally we’re going west. I don’t need a specific compass point.

Another thing you’ve pointed out that you think Harris should do is revise some of the more left-leaning views she took in 2019 and 2020, which I know you were critical of at the time. And she’s doing that. She’s saying, “I’m not going to ban fracking. I’m not going to do Medicare for all. I’m not going to ban plastic straws.” Which, personally, I was happy to hear.
I did a whole video on straws. I’m perfectly fine with paper straws.

I think they have about a 10 percent approval rating.
But if you look at my video — it’s on YouTube.

I’ll check it out.
I did exhaustive research on straws.

You’re the world’s leading expert.
Oh, yeah. I’m an expert on sucking.

Harris is sort of blanket-disavowing her past positions. She’s saying, “All right, well, I’m not in favor of this, this, this, this and this.”
You just say, “I’ve grown. I’ve learned a lot of things.” The truth of the matter is that, for some reason in 2020, people just kind of lost it. And it was all really — I don’t want to say dumb, but just not very smart stuff. And everybody has kind of dropped it. No one likes the word “woke” anymore, so I won’t use it. But the whole identity left — no one wants to talk about it anymore, for good reason. It was a giant mistake.

Biden was the one person who didn’t go that way.
Oh, you couldn’t explain it to him. He wouldn’t know what you were talking about.

Right, his........

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