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What James Carville Got Wrong

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James Carville lamented in a video that he and the Democratic Party have made some faulty assumptions about young people, the New York Post reports.

Said Carville: “Anybody that’s been around in politics as long as I have, you make monumental mistakes — strategic mistakes. Maybe the biggest one I made is I wrote a book saying the Democrats were destined to win for 40 more years because, look — we had the under-30s, we had non-White voters, and that was a growing coalition that would win elections.”

He added: “It’s what I call ‘political Presbyterianism,’ that elections are ordained and you can just put something in a fucking computer and it’ll spit out the percent you’re going to get. It turned out that that was a really, really stupid assumption.”

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goddard-bw-snapshotTaegan Goddard is the founder of Political Wire, one of the earliest and most influential political web sites. He also runs Political Job Hunt, Electoral Vote Map and the Political Dictionary.

Goddard spent more than a decade as managing director and chief operating officer of a prominent investment firm in New York City. Previously, he was a policy adviser to a U.S. Senator and Governor.

Goddard is also co-author of You Won - Now What? (Scribner, 1998), a political management book hailed by prominent journalists and politicians from both parties. In addition, Goddard's essays on politics and public policy have appeared in dozens of newspapers across the country.

Goddard earned degrees from Vassar College and Harvard University. He lives in New York with his wife and three sons.

Goddard is the owner of Goddard Media LLC.

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