Democratic strategist James Carville on Pres. Trump's electoral strength: "He got 44.8% in 2018. He suffered the worst electoral defeat in the House ever ... but yet, the media is going, 'Oh, he's so strong, he's so powerful, he's so this.' No he's not!"

James Carville, a former top adviser to President Clinton, laid out a scathing critique of his party, arguing that it drifted way too far to the left and was on the way to failure as a result of pushing extreme policy ideas.

"We just had an election in 2018. We did great. We talked about everything we needed to talk about and we won," he said in a Vox interview published on Friday. "And now it’s like we’re losing our damn minds. Someone’s got to step their game up here."

Carville added that he considered himself a "liberal" rather than a centrist -- but Democrats went too far even for him.

"They’ve tacked off the damn radar screen," he said when asked if the party moved too far left.

His comments came just after another interview in which he said he was "scared to death" after Sen. Bernie Sanders netted a large portion of the vote in Iowa's caucuses.

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According to Carville, both Sanders and Sens. Elizabeth Warren were pushing "stupid" ideas about higher education.

"Democrats talking about free college tuition or debt forgiveness. I’m not here to debate the idea. What I can tell you is that people all over this country worked their way through school, sent their kids to school, paid off student loans. They don’t want to hear this s--t. And you saw Warren confronted by an angry voter over this. It’s just not a winning message," he said.

Carville was referring to a tense interaction in which a father blasted Warren for forgiving student debt after he and his daughter worked to pay off her loans.

Carville also took a shot at Sanders for saying that he wanted to expand voting rights for people like the Boston bomber. Sanders, the well-known Democratic strategist suggested, would be ineffective as president and wasn't representative of the Democratic Party. Instead, Carville said, he is an "ideologue."

"[H]ere’s what I do know: Sanders might get 280 electoral votes and win the presidency and maybe we keep the House," Carville said. "But there’s no chance in hell we’ll ever win the Senate with Sanders at the top of the party defining it for the public ...So long as McConnell runs the Senate, it’s game over. There’s no chance we’ll change the courts and nothing will happen, and he’ll just be sitting up there screaming in the microphone about the revolution."

At one point, Carville took aim at a New York Times writer, who posted a "snarky tweet" about Louisiana State University (LSU) -- Carville's alma mater.

"You know how f-----g patronizing that is to people in the South or in the middle of the country? First, LSU has an unusually high graduation rate, but that’s not the point. It’s the goddamn smugness. This is from a guy who lives in New York and serves on the Times editorial board and there’s not a single person he knows that doesn’t pat him on the back for that kind of tweet. He’s so f-----g smart.

Do the Warren/Sanders "free public college" proposals include LSU, or would it only apply to actual schools?

— Binyamin Appelbaum (@BCAppelbaum) January 14, 2020

"[Binyamin] Appelbaum doesn’t speak for the Democratic Party, but he does represent the urbanist mindset," he said. "We can’t win the Senate by looking down at people. The Democratic Party has to drive a narrative that doesn’t give off vapors that we’re smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant."

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Carville is just the latest Democrat to highlight a growing divide between progressives and more establishment figures within the party. Progressives like Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and filmmaker Michael Moore maintain that pushing progressive policies is critical to winning elections. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the perceived Democratic moderate in 2020, caught flak from Ocasio-Cortez for not going far enough on climate change policy. He also changed his decades-old position on the Hyde Amendment -- a bipartisan measure blocking funding for most abortions -- amid criticism from his own party.

He said during that interview:

“Eighteen percent of the population controls 52 Senate seats,” Carville said. “We’ve got to be a majoritarian party. The urban core is not gonna get it done. What we need is power! Do you understand? That’s what this is about.”

AND then he went off with Vox too:

I’ll just say it this way: The fate of the world depends on the Democrats getting their shit together and winning in November. We have to beat Trump. And so far, I don’t like what I see. And a lot of people I talk to feel the same way.

And…

We just had an election in 2018. We did great. We talked about everything we needed to talk about, and we won. And now it’s like we’re losing our damn minds. Someone’s got to step their game up here.

Also:

We have candidates on the debate stage talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. They’re talking about doing away with nuclear energy and fracking. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments — talking about that is not how you win a national election. It’s not how you become a majoritarian party.

For fuck’s sake, we’ve got Trump at Davos talking about cutting Medicare and no one in the party has the sense to plaster a picture of him up there sucking up to the global elites, talking about cutting taxes for them while he’s talking about cutting Medicare back home. Jesus, this is so obvious and so easy and I don’t see any of the candidates taking advantage of it.

The Republicans have destroyed their party and turned it into a personality cult, but if anyone thinks they can’t win, they’re out of their damn minds.

And finally:

By framing, repeating, and delivering a coherent, meaningful message that is relevant to people’s lives and having the political skill not to be sucked into every rabbit hole that somebody puts in front of you.

The Democratic Party is the party of African Americans. It’s becoming a party of educated suburbanites, particularly women. It’s the party of Latinos. We’re a party of immigrants. Most of the people aren’t into all this distracting shit about open borders and letting prisoners vote. They don’t care. They have lives to lead. They have kids. They have parents that are sick. That’s what we have to talk about. That’s all we should talk about.

It’s not that this stuff doesn’t matter. And it’s not that we shouldn’t talk about race. We have to talk about race. It’s about how you deliver and frame the message. I thought Cory Booker’s “baby bonds” plan was great and the kind of thing the party could connect to people’s actual lives.

We have one moral imperative here, and that’s beating Trump. Nothing else matters.

I think he’s right. If they get stuck in rabbit holes of social justice they’re gonna lose to Trump badly. He’s smart enough to talk about things that really matter to the most of Americans, while Liz Warren is talking about transgender teens picking cabinet officials and Bernie is screaming about millionaires and billionaires.