Quotes from Steve Kornacki

Politics, as the cliche goes, is a full contact sport. When you choose to play, you're going to get hurt.

With writing, obviously you can really take the time to crack what you're going to say and build to a big point.

Exactly why Democrats were crushed in the '94 midterms is impossible to say.

History will always regard Florida as the state that decided the Bush-Gore contest, but if Gore had carried Tennessee, Arkansas, Missouri, West Virginia or Kentucky - all states that his boss won twice - then he'd have won the election anyway.

Newt Gingrich's rhetorical tics are well-known - his fondness for the word 'frankly,' his eagerness to frame even the most mundane development in dramatic world-historical terms, and his eagerness to accuse his enemies of practicing 'machine' politics.

Midterm elections, by nature, just aren't about the party that's out of power. But presidential years are different.

Governorships and Senate seats are the most common stepping-stone offices for presidential campaigns, and U.S. House seats are the most common stepping-stone positions for statewide campaigns.

By 1996, Clinton was able to run for re-election on the strength of what the '93 budget had delivered - and to taunt the Republicans (including his opponent, Bob Dole) for having been so afraid of it.

The Tea Party was really a two-front war - one against Obama, the other against any Republican politician who reeked of insiderdom or insufficient purity.

Whereas his father would deliver rambling lectures that were heavy on gold and often disconnected from the political news of the moment, Rand Paul communicates a desire to make himself relevant to the GOP conversation.

The Founders surely never imagined that a three-fifths majority would be the standard requirement for passing legislation in the upper chamber, and for most of American history it wasn't. But filibuster use skyrocketed in 1993, when Republicans found themselves locked out of the White House and big Democratic congressional majorities.

It's impossible to overstate the degree to which the '94 GOP revolution shook the political class. Bill Clinton was immediately dismissed as a one-term president. The main question was whether he'd bow to the inevitable and decline to seek reelection, or if it would take a primary challenge to dislodge him.

We read primary results to assure ourselves that this candidate has won this state's primary and can win the state in the general election. I think that's a very dubious jump to make.

We've seen senators like Ted Cruz before. The historical comparison most commonly invoked involves Joe McCarthy, whose scurrilous red-baiting crusade in the early 1950s shattered the careers of innocent public servants and alienated McCarthy from his fellow senators, but also made him a folk hero on the right. Jesse Helms comes to mind too.

Republicans have used the filibuster to turn the Senate into a de facto 60-vote body.

Bill Clinton broke what was known as the Republican electoral lock on the presidency, and Bill Clinton won the White House in 1992. That was sort of the impossible dream for Democrats.

Numerous candidates lose their first White House race and try again four years later - but all of them do so after running surprisingly well the first time. No one ever talked about John Connally or Phil Gramm running again.

There is huge money to be made - by candidates, by book publishers, by merchandise peddlers - from small-dollar conservative consumers who are as enraged by their own party's establishment as they are the Obama White House.

For more than a decade after the 2000 election, leading Democrats ran from their gun control past and bent over backward to assuage the fears of gun owners.

Chris Matthews is a giant. He's a legend.

There's been no end to the grief Mitch McConnell's taken for his declaration early in Barack Obama's first term that his party's top goal was to make Obama a one-term president.

I went to a public school, so we didn't have to wear a tie.

I learned you just need to know people who know how to tie ties, and they'll tie them for you, and you can just put them on and take them off.

In the old days, there were a couple of TV channels and that was it, so every channel tried to appeal to as broad of an audience as possible. Newt Gingrich recognized a way to bypass this and he did so through CSPAN.