WASHINGTON — Famed Democratic strategist James Carville has opened up about some of his worst botched predictions, admitting that experts don’t necessarily have better insights into the future than the average person.
“One of the things that I don’t like to ask experts in sports — and people ask me all the time, I don’t get mad about it — is, ‘Who’s going to win.’ The truth of the matter is, I’m not sure,” Carville told ESPN sports analyst Stephen A. Smith during a video interview for Politicon that aired last week.
“The truth of the matter is, I’m not a very good predictor of elections,” Carville said.
Carville, who is famous for being the top strategist for Bill Clinton’s successful upstart 1992 presidential campaign, has long had a penchant for snappy and bold political analyses.
In October 2024, he penned a now-infamous op-ed for the New York Times titled, “Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win” the presidential election.
President Trump defeated Harris days later.
Carville also authored the 2009 book, “40 More Years: How the Democrats Will Rule the Next Generation.”
Democrats are currently out of power in the White House and both chambers of Congress.
The Dem luminary made a sports analogy to drive home his point about experts.
“The truth is, if I asked Bill Belichick who does he think is gonna win the Super Bowl, he knows more football than any of us know. But I don’t know if he can predict the outcome of the game any better,” Carville reflected.
Carville said he even misjudged Smith when he first began paying attention to the ESPN host, recalling how he originally predicted that the sportscaster was “gonna burn himself out.
“I was dead wrong. You came in hot. You stayed hot. You’re still hot. Your first broadcast is not 5% different than your last broadcast,” Carville said.
Smith, who previously courted 2028 presidential buzz, announced earlier this month that he will not throw his hat in the ring and named three potential contenders he could back: Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“It’s not an expectation that you’re never going to be wrong,” Smith explained about expectations for pundits and experts.
“It’s an expectation that your opinion comes from an informed place. ‘This is what you believe, and here is why.’
“Whether it’s to agree or disagree with you, people are … seeking what to hear from your thoughts because they want to be smarter, they want to be validated as to what they believe or they want to be edified as to what they’re missing, and now they’re no longer missing it because of you,” Smith said.
The two pundits also analyzed the Democratic Party’s recent electoral struggles with young male voters, with Carville asking Smith to give Dems advice, given that he “might be the best person in the world communicating with young men.”
Smith replied, “Let’s speak the language of the average American citizen that’s out there trying to survive and feed their family every day.
“Let’s speak to those people as opposed to a portion of the LGBTQ+ community or woke culture or canceling somebody because they got a fact wrong or they said somebody’s name wrong.”
