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Democratic strategist James Carville on Sunday ripped into popular left-wing Twitch streamer Hasan Piker, saying that if he shapes himself into a force within the Democratic Party, “I’m out of here.”
“To talk about the larger Democratic Party, post the election in Michigan going forward, I am not going to be in the same party with Hasan Piker,” Carville said on Fox News’s “The Sunday Briefing,” referring to the Michigan Senate race between Abdul El-Sayed and Rep. Haley Stevens (D-Mich.).
“I have no intention of ever being in the same political party with that guy. Now, I think that a majority –– overwhelming majority of Democrats agree with me, but this idea that we’re going to seize the means of production and this –– just go look at the DSA platform,” he continued, referring to the Democratic Socialist of America (DSA).
Carville compared the growing contingent of progressives and democratic socialists on the Democrats’ side to Tucker Carlson and former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) eschewing the changes within the Republican Party.
But he reiterated that he and Piker will not be in the same political party, adding that “one of us is going to leave. It might even be me.”
Recent primary election victories have reopened old wounds between more establishment, traditional Democratic Party mainstays and younger, politically radical progressives challenging the party status quo.
Democratic socialist candidates running as Democrats have scored victories against multiple incumbents, while others have advanced to face off against Democratic incumbents in the November general election.
In a preview for CNN’s “The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper” set to air Sunday night, Carville pushed back against Piker’s claims that voters are looking for an alternative to typical Democrats and Republicans, pointing to Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-Vt.) two unsuccessful campaigns for president in 2016 and 2020.
“I have one simple philosophy about politics: Winning is everything, stupid,” Carville said before adding that Sanders “lost by a lot.”
Piker, who also spoke with CNN, said that the losses by Democrats have happened “so publicly and so spectacularly that it has caused people to seek alternatives.”
“Yeah, as opposed to previous neoliberal Democratic candidacies that have been spectacular successes so far. Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2016, and Kamala Harris in 2024,” Piker said, taking a jab at the party’s recent major losses at the federal level. “There are a lot of people who are just like, ‘This is not working.'”
Piker has been a prominent voice behind El-Sayed, who holds a 15-point advantage over Stevens. Some mainstream Democrats fret that progressive victories during Tuesday’s election could hurt the party’s chances of winning seats in Congress in November.
But Sanders on Sunday argued that El-Sayed can bring in independent and Republican voters who normally do not vote for Democrats, including older voters worried about healthcare.
“So if you’re a working-class Republican in Michigan, I think you’re going to listen to what El-Sayed says,” Sanders told host Kristen Welker on NBC News’s “Meet the Press.”
“And I think many of them will end up voting for him — independents as well, of course,” the senator said.
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