A famed political strategist thinks the midterms will be a nightmare for President Donald Trump.
James Carville, the 81-year-old former consultant for Bill Clinton, said the numbers show that Republicans will get “slaughtered” in November while Democrats will take both the House and the Senate “with ease.”
In an interview on The Daily Beast Podcast, Carville said Democrats’ double-digit overperformances in special elections and Trump’s flailing approval rating point to a potential 55-seat majority for Democrats in the Senate, where margins are already razor-thin.
“So your prediction right now is Democrats will take both the House and the Senate at this stage?” Daily Beast political reporter Sarah Ewall-Wice asked Carville.
“With ease—not just ‘take,’” he responded. “I mean, I’m talking about eight Senate seats or something like that. But if you look at where we are at this moment, I don’t know how a person could honestly draw another conclusion… Right now, all of the evidence would have pointed to 55.”
Democrats have flipped 30 state legislative seats from red to blue in elections since Trump returned to the White House last year. Republicans, meanwhile, have not flipped a single one.
In deep-red Texas, first-time Democratic candidate Taylor Rehmet, 33, toppled his Republican opponent in a district that Trump carried by more than 17 points in 2024. In Arkansas, Democrat Alex Holladay, 43, scored a double-digit victory, flipping a red seat. And in a Florida district that includes Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s beloved backyard, Democrat Emily Gregory, 41, beat the Republican candidate endorsed by the president.
“If you’re running 10, 11 points consistently ahead of 2024 performance, you’re looking at a lot,” Carville said. “I mean, once you start going north of five, things start to follow. And every piece of evidence we have thus far indicates that that’s what’s happening.”
“Can you come back and say, ‘Well, you said this in late March and here we are in October and you’re saying something different’? Yeah, because when the facts change, I change my mind. But right now, my over-under for Senate seats is 55. I would be semi-disappointed if it was 53 Democratic seats.”
But Carville also expressed fear that signs of a looming blue wave could spook Trump into trying some dirty tricks.
The veteran political consultant said he feared the possibility of Trump attempting to seize ballots in November and put federal forces on the ground.
“He’s just literally playing with more than dynamite here. He’s playing with napalm. And what really keeps me up at night is that he tries this, and then there’s some flashpoint, there’s some incident,” Carville said. “And the next thing you know—and of course that’s exactly what he wants—so then he can claim, ‘It’s too violent out there, I’m playing harsh.’”
Earlier this week, Trump’s former campaign manager Steve Bannon said the deployment of ICE officers to airports could be a “test run” for immigration agents’ involvement in the midterms.
“Bannon knows—and even Trump in his own primitive way knows—the Republican Party will get slaughtered in November. So he’s trying to lay the groundwork to have something like this,” Carville warned.
“What they do know, what scares me, is they can’t have a free and fair election. That is a disaster for them,” he continued. “They know that. They’re going to do everything they can to stop it... That’s where we are. And expect the worst. Expect the worst.”
The White House responded with an attack on Carville.
“James Carville is a stone-cold loser who clearly suffers from a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain,” spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement to the Daily Beast on Friday.
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