BRIGHT RED SPOT

Carville Reveals the Only Republican Winner From Midterms Disaster

One red state managed to evade the GOP rout—and got kudos from a top Democratic strategist.

The GOP may have been wiped out by a blue wave, but a top Democratic strategist thinks one Republican stood out as a winner in the midterms.

James Carville, 82, said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis set himself apart from the Republican Party in Tuesday’s elections that saw Americans resoundingly rebuke the GOP and the Trump administration.

“The Republican winner last night was Ron DeSantis,” Carville said Wednesday on his Politicon podcast Politics War Room with Al Hunt. “Ron DeSantis can say, ‘We get better and you wanna win? Look at what we did in Florida.’”

Florida bucked the GOP rout, with Trump-endorsed candidates Ashley Moody and Byron Donalds winning the Senate and gubernatorial races, respectively. The GOP also scored 16 House seats in Florida compared to only 7 for Democrats as of Thursday morning.

“I don’t like Ron DeSantis, don’t get me wrong. But everybody had dismissed him as out of hand,” Carville said. “When a party gets beat and you watch the image of the Republican Party, it’s gonna go really down. That’s why the Democratic Party was so unpopular. It was unpopular with me because when you lose, I don’t like you.”

“And DeSantis, he said, ‘Look, I agree with a lot of Trump’s policies,’” he continued. “I don’t know what his stock is, but whatever chance he had last night has doubled in the last 24 hours.”

DeSantis admitted on Wednesday that the midterms were “close to an extinction-level event for Republicans in many parts of the country.”

“Not only is that gonna totally change the dynamic of the next two years to the detriment, of course, of President Trump—this is gonna last far beyond just two years,” he said in a press conference. “You look ahead to ‘28 election, a presidential election, you are not, as Republicans, gonna be able to retake the Senate under this current map just two years from now. And with all the House seats that have been done, probably not viable to take that back.”

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DeSantis credited the GOP’s success in Florida to their “record of achievement.”

“So the question is, is why did Florida hold up? Why were we able to hold the line?” he said. “We’ve earned trust from a number of our voters that even in the worst situation that you can imagine politically, we were able to hold the line and prevent the worst from happening here.”

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Julia OrnedoReporter

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