Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville on Tuesday lamented to MSNBC’s Ari Melber that Democrats “didn’t have a choice” when it came to nominating Vice President Kamala Harris as the party’s 2024 presidential candidate.

In the run up to last week’s election, Carville expressed his fears over a Trump win but repeatedly stated that Harris would defeat Donald Trump. The day before, Carville even said the GOP nominee’s campaign had “the smell of a loser.”

But after Trump scored a decisive victory in the Electoral College (and remains on track to win the popular vote), Carville, who helped Bill Clinton to election success, pointed the finger of blame at President Joe Biden for not abandoning his reelection campaign until mid-July.

By that time, Carville said, it was far too late for another hopeful, apart from the vice president, to take over the candidacy.

Carville told Melber of Harris: “We didn’t get to kick the tires, we didn’t get to look under the hood, we didn’t get to look at the trim, we were just given the keys at full sticker price and honestly we had no choice.”

The “talent level in the Democratic Party is utterly breathtaking,” said Carville, who would have, he continued, given “anything if we’d gotten six or seven of these people out of the track, let them run around.”

Biden stayed in the race for three weeks after his disastrous debate performance against Trump, noted Carville. But had Biden quit immediately after, then at least Democrats could have organized town halls to put its talent on display and potentially run another candidate, he added.

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