Since the Democratic convention, Hillary Clinton has opened an average lead in national polls over Donald Trump of more than 5 percent, and is posting a double-digit lead over her Republican rival in a number of traditional battleground states—a lead that may to expand in light of Trump's recent refusal to soften his stance on immigration reform. But after the F.B.I. discovered 15,000 previously undisclosed e-mails and documents in their investigation into Clinton’s e-mail practices when she served as secretary of state, the presidential hopeful is fighting another wave of criticism. The latest chapter in the candidate’s enduring e-mail scandal has prompted fresh accusations that the Democratic nominee gave preferential treatment to major Clinton Foundation donors and nurtured a “pay to play” culture during her State Department tenure.

Before the fresh wave of scandal broke, James Carville, a longtime Clinton confidant and political strategist who guided Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, spoke to *Vanity Fair’*s Hive about Clinton’s chances in the 2016 presidential election and how the party of Lincoln ended up with Trump as its nominee.

The Hive: So, who is going to win the election?

James Carville: It’s hard to look at it right now and come to any other conclusion than it is going to be a pretty sizable win for the Democrats. It’s pretty hard to see anything else.

Was it ever close?

Well, I mean, the demographic changes in the country are substantial, and they are changing rapidly in a way that is unfavorable to the Republican Party. And the Republicans, I would say, continue to make a bad bet. They keep doubling down on these non-college whites. This has proven to be very successful in certain parts of the country and in off-year elections, but it has not worked very well at all in presidential years. It’s working terribly now.

Beyond those changing demographics, why is the Republican Party struggling this cycle?

Look, the last time we had a Republican president we had a disastrous war and a disastrous recession. To the extent that peace and prosperity matter to anybody—which have traditionally been the two biggest drivers in American politics—they do not bode well for the Republicans. It’s hard to expect that you are going to do very well if that’s people’s most recent memory of your party governing, in addition to being a party whose primary appeal is to the shrinking demographic that is non-college whites. In some ways it’s amazing to me that they are not doing worse. Honestly.

Trump’s hard-core supporters are not the same people who voted for Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz, or Jeb Bush. What’s happening to the Republican Party?

Trump came in and fit perfectly with at least half of the Republican Party, which is some version of an ethnocentric, nationalistic party that is very different from what we have traditionally seen from Republicans. And I think that as Republicans have perceived their party to be shrinking, they have hardened in their views, which is pretty damaging to their immediate-term prospects.

There are a lot of people in the United States that genuinely—and with some validity—think their influence is shrinking. Their lives have not turned out as they expected or hoped. If you’re a 53-year-old white guy that didn’t go to college, the chances are that you have had a pretty rough life. You have probably switched jobs any number of times, lost your health insurance any number of times, almost lost your house in the recession, and Trump comes along and says, “Of course this happened to you because of stupid politicians and immigrants.” He is appealing to people who look around, and their constant refrain is, “This is not the same country that we grew up in.” And it’s not.

They are used to people like them running the country and they see that less and less. They see the culture changing around them. They see the influence of rural America and small-town America declining and their institutions deteriorating. Trump has an explanation for them. Jeb Bush doesn’t.

You’ve predicted that Clinton will win by a landslide in November, but she has a number of weaknesses, too.

Whatever weaknesses Clinton has, Trump constantly covers them up. No, I think that here you are in a country where 65 percent wanted change. The country has been looking for something new, and Clinton has been a part of public life for most people’s conscious lifetimes—from First Lady to senator to secretary of state to two-time presidential candidate—and now she is seeking a third term for her party, which is traditionally a difficult thing to do.

If you were starting in a lab, Clinton might not have been the model candidate, but there is a large group of people within the Democratic Party that thought that she had worked for it and earned it on her terms. I think that worked pretty well for her. But what really worked well for her is that Republicans—I don’t know whether you’d call it an implosion, rather than an explosion—have driven themselves to a bad gamble and keep doubling down on a bad bet and they can’t get off of it.

Let’s say you were running Hillary’s campaign now. What would you do differently?

I would probably do pretty close to what the campaign is doing now. I mean, since the Democratic convention, Trump has pretty much dominated the coverage with things that he has said and done. I certainly wouldn’t get in his way right now. This is not the most strategically challenging campaign, as long as he is behaving as he is.

Since the convention, Hillary has been reaching across the aisle to Republicans, a version of the “triangulation” strategy that Bill Clinton employed in his 1996 re-election campaign. Do you think it will work for her now the same way it did for him?

People are reaching out to her. Republicans are refusing to endorse Trump. And what politician doesn’t say, “good, that’s great”? But I don’t know that her programs have changed very much from where they were at the end of the convention.

In 1992, the most treasured voter was a voter that would sort of swing back and forth, one that might vote for Republican for president, Democrat for governor. The voter that didn’t have that strong of a partisan ID. These were the voters that we targeted. But because people have become much, much more partisan, the prime voter in 2016 is someone that you don’t know if they are going to vote, but if they vote they will vote Democratic. The prime voter in 1992 was a voter that you knew was going to vote, but you didn’t know how they were going to vote. I can’t emphasize that enough. That’s the biggest change in political presidential strategy that you have had, bar none.

Who is that key voter today that could swing the election?

Every election produces a trending demographic—we had soccer moms, we had the Hispanic vote—the place that there is a little elasticity in the electorate. In this election, it is college whites. They are going to be the people that are really going to decide. Trump has to try to win them over, but he is doing much worse with that particular demographic than Romney did. Republicans have never lost college whites in the history of polling, and right now Trump is behind Clinton, or, at best, even.

Last month you said that Trump was “pretty stupid about politics.” Can you expand on that?

Most people in life—and particular in politics—have an instinct for the kind of people that you elevate. P.O.W.s—most politicians in either party would say, “Oh, what a sacrifice,” you know? Trump attacks them. Or, most politicians use a baby as a kind of prop, if you will. But Trump’s instinct is contrary to making sense. His political reflex on some level is just nonexistent. He says, “Get that baby out of here.” I just kind of marvel at that.

So what happens to the G.O.P. now?

I just didn’t think that a modern American party was capable of suicide. I thought that something would happen, that somebody would think of a way to stop this. And they couldn’t. I think that they wanted to but they couldn’t. And most of the Republicans that I talk to, which are quite a few, they are not so much worried about losing the election as I think they are about losing an entire generation. No one knows how much damage that Trump is going to cause the Republican Party beyond 2016. It is really something, to watch a party just march right over a cliff, and no one can stop them.