James Carville blasts Crockett for breaking 'first rule of politics,' focusing on herself more than voters

Dec 12, 2025 - 01:01
James Carville blasts Crockett for breaking 'first rule of politics,' focusing on herself more than voters

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville spoke about Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett’s bid for the Senate in Thursday’s episode of his podcast, arguing she tends to break a key rule of politics. 

"Politics War Room" podcast co-host Al Hunt argued Crockett throwing her hat into the ring for the Texas Senate is good news. He argued that the most likely Democratic candidate to win would be state Rep. James Talarico, saying, "If he ends up running against Ken Paxton, I like those odds." 

Carville said he feels more optimistic about Texas than he has in a long time. 

"I’ll address the issue of Jasmine Crockett," Carville said. "First of all, it seems like she’s well-educated. It seems like she's got a lot of energy. But she, to me, she violates the first rule of politics, and that is, in politics, you always make it about the voters and never about yourself.

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"You listen to her talk. It's a lot more about herself than it is the voters."

He warned that Crockett lives in a district that favors Democrats by 24 points, arguing it would be far better for her to try to rally Democrats in districts that slightly favor Republicans.

"You can stay in Congress as long as you want," Carville suggested. "You can get all the hits. You can get all the clicks. You can get on all of the TV shows. You can get in as long as you're polemic, but you're not helping very much."

He went on to argue that a perfect example of Democrats making unforced errors would be Tennessee’s 7th district, where Aftyn Behn was considered a poor choice of candidate in an election where Republicans were unusually vulnerable.

Carville joked that it was as if Democrats had "gone into a lab" to "design the worst candidate that we could possibly run in Tennessee 7.

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"We would pick somebody who said they didn't like country music. We could pick someone that said they don't even like where they live. We could pick someone that said they wanted to pay for gender-affirming surgery for prison. We could pick someone that said, 'We want to defund the police.' Actually, we picked that person. We actually did. And even there, she cut the margin from 22 to nine.

"But we know what wins elections," Carville concluded. "We just do. And what wins elections is not sitting there talking incessantly about yourself. Winning elections is not how many clicks you get or how much overnight fundraising you do. Winning elections is being part of framing issues and understanding where people are coming from, and I don't think Congressman Crockett is very good at that. I’ll be very frank."

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Fox News Digital reached out to Behn and Crockett and did not receive an immediate response.