Donald Trump had a “terrible” night Tuesday when the candidates he endorsed narrowly won their runoff primaries, James Carville argued.
On the Politics War Room podcast, Carville, 81, reacted to the Senate primary in South Carolina and the gubernatorial primary in Oklahoma. Sen. Darline Graham won the former with 52.5 percent, and ex-State Sen. Mike Mazzei won the latter with 50.28 percent, beating his opponent by only about 2,000 votes out of over 371,000 cast. Those two wins came a week after the number of Trump-endorsed GOP candidates who lost their races this primary season reached double digits, with six occurring in August alone.
But to Carville, any notion of Trump, 80, reasserting his strength over Republican primaries was overblown.
“In my opinion, this is a terrible night for Trump. He barely got above 50 in Republican primaries in South Carolina and Oklahoma,” the Democratic strategist said. “They played it as a big Trump win. I don’t understand it.”
In addition to those margins, Carville called attention to how some supporters of South Carolina Rep. Ralph Norman, Graham’s opponent, booed Trump for getting involved in the race. This, he said, may reflect Trump’s weakening grip on his base.
“Man, when you get 50.5 in a Republican primary in South Carolina, and then the guy that got 49-and-a-half attacks you and the crowd breaks out wildly cheering, or in Oklahoma—which, I don’t know if there’s a redder state or place in the world than Oklahoma—and they barely won,” Carville said, though Norman received 47.5 percent of the vote.
Carville then criticized coverage of the races by The New York Times.
“And we’re told by all of the people, this was a, you know, ‘Trump rolls again, the rolling Trump! He comes up and he lands on his feet.’ I don’t buy it,” he said. “I’m talking one f---ing thing and Peter Baker and The New York Times are talking another thing, and I usually can understand where they’re coming from. I have no idea where this take on this election came from.”
One Times headline, which did not have Baker’s byline, declared a “triumph” by Trump and Graham. Baker, the Times’ chief White House correspondent, shared on X an excerpt of the paper’s initial story on the South Carolina race, in which another reporter described the result as a “major win” for the president.
When reached for comment, White House spokesperson Allison Schuster told the Daily Beast in a statement that Trump’s endorsement “is the most powerful endorsement in the history of American politics. Anyone claiming otherwise is a complete and utter fool. The President’s record speaks for itself: out of more than 260 endorsements, the President has a 97% success rate.”
