On October 23, 2024, Democratic strategist James Carville published an op-ed in The New York Times. The headline read, “Three Reasons I’m Certain Kamala Harris Will Win.” He cited her fundraising. He cited Republican losing streaks. He even cited his own feeling, as if he was the election whisperer. “It’s just a feeling,” he wrote. “America, it will all be OK.” Twelve days later, Carville was explaining that what “killed” the Democrats was “the unfortunate events of what I would refer to as the woke era.” He was wrong about the win. He was wrong about the cause of the loss. And he has spent every month since being wrong loudly, in public, while pointing fingers at everyone who told him the truth before it even happened.
This is where we start.
Not because Carville is uniquely evil. Because he is the perfect, documented, on-the-record dipshit of a thirty-year failure that the establishment wing of the Democratic Party has never once been made to answer for. He is what an accountability-free career looks like. And he isn’t alone.
This is the story of how the Democratic establishment didn’t just lose. NO, these bastards betrayed us. Deliberately. Repeatedly. For the love of money.
Let’s Be Honest About What “Centrist” Means
The word “centrist” is doing a lot of work in American political coverage and almost none of it is honest. It implies balance. Reasonableness. A principled middle between two extremes. But, that isn’t what it is. What the “center” pundits and party operatives talk about isn’t the center of the electorate. It is the center of the elite donor class, upholding a corporate-friendly status quo. It is the quicksand you land on when the people funding your campaigns are health insurance executives, private equity managers, pharmaceutical lobbyists, and hedge fund billionaires. Establishment “Centurist” Democrats turned their voting base into a transaction.
The neoliberal economic program embraced by the Clinton-era Democratic Party alienated working-class voters. Democrats responded not by correcting course but by reorienting their entire electoral strategy toward professional-class voters, actively accelerating workers’ departure from the party. They did this on purpose. It was their working strategy. And it has been remade, election cycle after election cycle, for thirty fucking years. Clinton’s political architects understood that a massive realignment was underway. They abandoned its traditional working-class base in favor of a professional, highly educated elite. Democrats began preaching cultural tolerance and demographic diversity, even as they broke from basic issues of economic fairness. They traded the working class for swanky wine cave fundraisers. Then they spent decades calling the working class “unreachable.”
Follow the Money. All the Way Down.
The truth we all need to connect with is that senators who refused to sponsor Medicare for All have, over their careers, raised twice as much insurance industry cash as those who supported it. As Bernie Sanders finalized his Medicare for All Act of 2017, corporate lobbyists representing major private insurers and drug companies poured hundreds of thousands of dollars into Senate Democrats’ campaign accounts. Many of those same senators then refused to sign on. Sounds like a business arrangement to me.
In 2022, seven Democratic senators joined Republicans to shield their private equity donors from a new corporate minimum tax, handing the industry a $35 billion gift. Five of those seven senators were among the Senate’s top recipients of campaign donations from private equity donors. Five of seven. It wasn’t coincidence then either.
Third Way — these assholes — spent two decades telling the Democratic Party that progressive policy is a liability. They’re a dark money nonprofit funded primarily by individuals with close ties to the banking industry. It purposefully does not disclose its donors. In a 2025 memo, it told Democrats to curb “far-left influence,” adopt a “pro-capitalist” stance, stop “demonizing wealth and corporations,” and reduce reliance on small donors, implying the gap be filled by large donors, super PACs, and the wealthy. Maybe we wouldn’t demonize them so much if they quit acting like demons… but, I digress. A bank-funded think tank, telling the party of working people to stop listening to working people and start listening to banks. And the DNC establishment bent over and took it up the tailpipe.
Now there is a newer, more aggressive version of the same machine. A network called Majority Democrats, seeded by hedge fund manager Stephen Mandel, Nvidia board member Tench Coxe, venture capitalist Bill Helman, Netflix co-founder Reed Hastings, and LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, is pouring millions into Democratic primaries specifically to defeat progressive challengers. It has raised 96% of its funds from donors who gave $1 million or more. 62% came from donors who gave at least $5 million. They promised they wouldn’t take “corporate PAC money.” But that term, by their own definition, excludes billionaire donors and billionaire-funded super PACs. It is a sleight of hand. These are not people trying to beat Trump. These are investors managing risk. And the risk they are managing is the possibility that a progressive candidate might actually win, and then ACTUALLY govern for the people who voted for them instead of the people who paid for them.
What They Did to Stop Us
The financial capture is the why. The DCCC blacklist, the dark money primaries, the consultant networks — those are the how.
In 2019, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee formally instituted a policy prohibiting the consulting firms it worked with from doing any business with candidates challenging incumbent House Democrats in primaries. They said it was “incumbent protection.” But it wasn’t. It was progressive suppression. The timing is too perfect. It came immediately after the 2018 cycle in which progressive challengers ousted longtime Democratic incumbents. Most notably when Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez defeated Joe Crowley, an ascendant party leader and major DCCC fundraiser. The lesson the party took from that race was not “this is what an energized base looks like.” The lesson was “we need to make sure this shit can’t happen again.”
Rep. Ayanna Pressley called it immediately for what it was. She said it was a policy that would “silence new voices and historically marginalized communities,” undermining “an entire universe of potential candidates, especially women and people of color.” The blacklist was never purely about protecting incumbents anyway. During 2020, a moderate challenger to Ilhan Omar used shell corporations to circumvent it and access vendors reserved for incumbents, resulting in legal action. And Nancy Pelosi personally endorsed a primary challenger against progressive Sen. Ed Markey, co-sponsor of the Green New Deal, which she had memorably dismissed as “the Green Dream, or whatever.”
They didn’t just try to stop progressives from winning; these dickheads tried to stop us from running entirely.
The Part That Should Piss Us All Off
65% of likely voters support Medicare for All — including 78% of Democrats, 71% of independents, and 49% of Republicans. Even after being told the policy would eliminate most private insurance and replace premiums with higher taxes, 63% still supported it. The support held under argument.
In the same 2024 election in which Deficit Don won the presidency, voters in multiple states passed ballot measures raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, expanding paid sick leave, protecting abortion rights, and strengthening workers’ right to unionize. Same voters, same election. The policies ran ahead of the candidate everywhere they were allowed to stand alone.
A Center for American Progress analysis found that working-class and college-educated voters want virtually the same things. They want a higher minimum wage, stronger unions, higher taxes on the wealthy, greater public investment in infrastructure, and an expanded social safety net. The people were never the problem. The party deciding which candidates could reach the people was the problem.
After the 2024 election, the general president of the Laborers’ International Union of North America said the quiet part out loud, “I don’t think the party has fully embraced, and hasn’t for decades, really, working-class people.” That is a union leader. Not a progressive activist. This is the head of a major labor union telling you that the party of the working class stopped being the party of the working class, and they watched it happen from the inside. Where we fuck up as voters, time and time again, is not listening to the people on the inside. That’s where the truth lives.
Centrists blamed the progressive penumbra of Harris’s earlier positions for the 2024 loss. But down ballot Democrats who held equally liberal positions didn’t suffer the same fate. Democratic turnout was down in liberal strongholds and not because voters rejected progressive policy but because there was an enthusiasm gap. Establishment democrats royally fucked up their messaging. The base didn’t turn out for a candidate who had been systematically stripped of anything that made her worth turning out for. They didn’t run too far left. They ran so hard away from the left that their own voters stayed home.
And Now, the Villain’s Last Act
A week after the 2024 loss, Carville admitted that “there are things Bernie Sanders favored that we could have put more front and center.” Then, within months, he called for an “amicable split” from progressives and threatened to sue DNC vice chair David Hogg, arguing that Hogg, as an officer of the DNC, had a fiduciary duty not to fund primary challenges against incumbent Democrats. He wanted to take a Parkland survivor to court for believing that voters should decide who represents them.
This is what accountability-free failure looks like after thirty years. Litigation threats against the next generation for daring to say: let the people decide.
I only have one message for James Carville: eat a dick.
Why Progressives Are the Only Honest Answer
The case for progressive candidates is not ideological, but evidentiary.
In November 2025, Zohran Mamdani, a 34-year-old democratic socialist who ran on working-class issues, free childcare, affordable housing, and community safety, won the New York City mayoral race, defeating former Governor Andrew “sexual assaulter” Cuomo by building a coalition the establishment said couldn’t exist. Voter turnout surpassed two million people… the highest since 1969 for crying out loud. People who had not voted in decades showed up. Because they were given something worth showing up for.
In Michigan right now, Abdul El-Sayed, who rebuilt Detroit’s health department after bankruptcy, removed lead from schools, expanded Narcan access, and spearheaded a program that canceled up to $700 million in medical debt for 300,000 Michiganders, is running for Senate against the full force of the billionaire machine. He refuses corporate money and recent polling shows him leading the primary field and performing as the strongest candidate against the Republican incumbent in the general election. The establishment is spending MILLIONS to stop him. Because he might win. And if he wins, he’ll owe them nothing.
Progressive democratic candidates are not fighting for an ideology. They are fighting for a governing arrangement in which elected officials are accountable to the people who voted for them rather than the people who funded them. They are the only candidates in the Democratic Party whose incentive structure is actually aligned with the working class, because they are the only ones who built their campaigns on the working class rather than on the donor class.
Working-class families are not disengaged because they don’t care. They are disengaged because they do not see their struggles reflected in party platforms dominated by corporate interests and technocratic solutions. The establishment didn’t lose the working class. They traded us away for a few pieces of silver. They took the insurance money and the private equity money and the hedge fund money, and they handed back incrementalism and fake-ass politeness and the quiet assurance that nothing would really change.
Progressives are not a gamble. They are the correction. The machine will tell you they can’t win. It said that about AOC. It said that about Mamdani. It is saying it right now about El-Sayed, and it is spending millions of billionaire dollars to make sure you believe it, because the one thing a billionaire-funded machine cannot survive is a candidate who doesn’t need it.
This isn’t whether progressives can win. It’s whether we are finally angry enough to make the fucking machine answer for thirty years of telling us they couldn’t. Know your Progressive grassroots Democratic candidates and vote for them.
They are the solution.
If a paid subscription isn’t in the cards right now, I completely get it — truly. But if you’ve ever read something here and thought “damn, she needs to keep doing this,” you can throw a few bucks in the tip jar over at Buy Me a Coffee.
No pressure. No guilt. Just me, asking nicely, with my hand out like a very earnest raccoon who writes controversial essays.
☕ buymeacoffee.com/eeviebateman
Thank you for being here. Seriously. You make this worth doing.
This was a great piece. Can I just say Carville was talking from a place of established democrats. Kamala didn’t win because America wasn’t electing a black woman as president. Just as Hilary wasn’t winning because America wasn’t voting for a woman as president. I’m saying this as someone who voted for Hilary and Kamala. Disappointed in the country for not doing the right thing. It just speaks of where we are at with Race and other issues. They’d rather have what’s going on with How Trump is running this country. Then a Kamala. just tells you all you need to know. See you at the Mid terms.
Primaries bring out new voters, it allows us to have conversations. It makes safe democrats earn their votes instead of taking them for granted. There is a caveat though. We need to run the right candidates for our district. Should a Democrat challenge Mahaela Plesa in HD 70, no, that is a hard fought emerging democratic district. Am I happy about losing Chris Turner in HD 101? No, he was a fighter and we need him but also there was no where else Junior could run, and Junior was more progressive and reached more voters. It happens. But there is no Republican in that race. So is he going to turn out more voters in November? I don’t know.