A “necessary” Democratic civil war is coming, political strategist James Carville warned on Monday, but the party must present a unified front and avoid public brawling until after the 2026 midterm elections.
“The Democratic Party is steamrolling toward a civilized civil war,” Carville wrote in a New York Times op-ed. “It’s necessary to have it. It’s even more necessary to delay it.”
Carville mused over the growing factions within the Democratic Party as establishment centrists are increasingly pitted against progressive and, in some cases, proudly socialist voices on the Left. The deepening schism has played out on the national stage in frictions within the Democratic National Committee, where turmoil ended with the ouster of youthful DNC progressive David Hogg. The fractures nationwide were recently mirrored in New York, where socialist candidate Zohran Mamdani made waves for capturing a critical victory in the Democratic mayoral primary against the more centrist candidate, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo.
Carville conceded that Democrats must, at some point, hash out their differences and coalesce on where to head as a party and as a movement. However, he said that can only happen after the 2026 midterm elections. Only after those can the 2028 presidential campaign cycle commence and a leader emerge who can lead the party back to victory, he argued.
“The only thing that can save [Democrats] now is an actual savior, because a new party can be delivered only by a person — see Barack Obama in 2008 and Bill Clinton in 1992,” the Democratic strategist wrote. “No matter how many podcasts or influencer streams our bench of candidates go on, our new leader won’t arrive until the day after the midterms in November 2026, which marks the unofficial-yet-official beginning of the 2028 presidential primary. No new party or candidate has a chance for a breakthrough until that day.”
Carville urged Democrats to focus in the coming months on winning the 2026 midterm elections instead of focusing on intraparty disagreements. Democrats should target Republicans over Trump’s recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill Act, Carville said, arguing that the law is a “big, steaming doggy nugget of epic proportion, contemptible to a vast majority of the nation.”
“We must run unified in opposition to the Republicans to gain as many House seats as possible in the midterms, because every congressional seat we gain in 2026 means we will be more likely to bring about change in 2028,” he wrote.
In New York, the “civil war” has played out as leading Democratic establishment figures such as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) have declined thus far to endorse Mamdani, who is backed on the other side of the party by progressive powerhouses including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) and Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT).
Jeffries has particularly expressed concern about Mamdani’s refusal to condemn the phrase “globalize the intifada” — anti-Jewish language that has been chanted at progressive, pro-Palestinian rallies.
During a podcast appearance earlier this month, Carville called on the mayoral candidate to get that “s*** out of [his] mouth,” calling the phrase “troubling.”
“He’s been given every opportunity to walk it back, OK, so I am quite befuddled by it,” Carville said. “And people that I have an enormous respect for … Hakeem Jeffries, are like, ‘Come on, man.’ S***, this ain’t this hard. I mean, you could just see the angst in their voice.”
In his Monday op-ed, Carville suggested that Mamdani’s success in New York was the result of a leadership vacuum with the Democratic Party fueled by deep divides along generational and ideological lines.
“It represents an undeniable fissure in our political soul,” he said.
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Carville has often suggested that progressives should “split off” from the Democratic Party instead of attempting to make establishment centrists capitulate to their demands.
“Goddamn, these people are just helpless,” he said in May in response to controversial comments made by Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), a leading progressive “Squad” member. “They cannot be helped. There’s nothing you can do to help them — don’t want to be helped. And if they had any guts, start their own goddamned political party and get out of ours.”
