Democratic strategist James Carville has some bold proposals for Democrats in the Trump era.
On Wednesday’s episode of his Politics War Room podcast, Carville said that Democrats “are right when they say this democracy is really imperfect.”
With that diagnosis in mind, Carville unleashed a flood of recommendations for Democrats if they win back both chambers of Congress and the presidency in 2028—a prospect that Carville said is “certainly not impossible.”
“They are just going to have to unilaterally add Puerto Rico and [the] District of Columbia [as] states … They’re just going to have to do it,” Carville said. “And they may have to expand the [Supreme Court] to 13 members.”
While the latter proposal could be enacted via legislation passed through Congress, it has struggled to gain traction outside of progressive circles within the party.
In 2021, a group of four Democrats introduced a bill to expand the court, which has varied in size from five to 10 justices over time but has remained stable at nine since the mid-1800s.
Granting statehood to Puerto Rico and D.C. would also be a steep climb, requiring the same legislative approval in both chambers. Full statehood for the territories has never come close to passing Congress.
The closest that either territory has come to statehood came in 1979, when the D.C. Voting Rights Amendment passed Congress but was only ratified by 16 states. That amendment would have given D.C. some of the privileges of being a state (e.g., congressional representation) without actually making it a state.
In addition to these long-shot policy proposals, Carville also argued that Democrats should seek to enact a law regulating congressional redistricting efforts as Republicans in Texas mount a controversial attempt to gerrymander five Democratic-controlled districts.
The long-term prescription for Democrats, who have looked to Carville as an election-whisperer since he masterminded former President Bill Clinton’s shocking 1992 presidential win, comes a few weeks after Carville referred to the party as a “cracked-out clown car” in a New York Times op-ed.
Carville didn’t discuss the feasibility of his proposals, but he emphasized that the current political moment demands that Democrats embrace ideas that would be hard to stomach under normal circumstances.
“Any of those things in isolation, I would be skeptical about. ... I would say, ‘Well, I don’t know if that’s the greatest idea in the world, you’re opening Pandora’s Box,’” he said.
“If you want to save democracy, I think you got to do all of those things because we just are moving further and further away from being anything close to democracy.”
Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that statehood requires a majority vote in both houses of Congress.
