Carville gives dire warning for future presidents to embrace populism or 'this thing could break'

Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville warned Thursday that any American president going forward must confront the affordability crisis facing young people.

"The thing that's coming in this country, and we're not ready for it, and that is the accumulation of generational wealth by our generation," Carville said on his "Politics War Room" podcast.

"It's just these stories that are coming out, and the young people have just … they're just having it terribly. They can't buy houses. They can't educate anybody. There was the CEO of Ford saying there's 5,000 auto mechanic jobs that they have that they can't fill.

"I think that this country made two bad bets," Carville added, "And they both seemed like good bets at the time. One is we decided we're going to be a nation of homeowners. And, two, that we were going to be a nation of people that went to college. Both of those strategies are, in effect, blowing up in our faces.

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"The next president is going to have to rethink this and is going to have to embrace some economic populism because I'm going to tell you, this thing could break. And if somebody doesn't get ahead of it, it's going to get ahead of everybody else," Carville said. "And people are starting to get really pissed. They're starting to figure out what's happened to their lives."

Carville is one of several commentators who have sounded the alarm on the issue, as many Democrats have been debating how to appeal to young male voters struggling to enter the middle class in a changing, globalized economy.

In March 2024, months before President Donald Trump defeated former Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election, Carville warned Democrats to abandon woke politics, arguing the party was dominated by "too many preachy females," both of which, he said, were alienating male voters. 

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On Thursday, Carville said many younger Americans are "starting to figure out why they don't have a lot of hope to get a good job or to be able to buy a house. Because, people, once we all bought houses, we put zoning restrictions and God knows what else just to drive the price of the asset up, which our price of our asset goes up, the price of what a young person has to pay goes up too.

"We've got to really rethink this whole idea of four-year college and homeownership."

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