Quotes About Elections

Journalists are notoriously prone to exaggerate the beneficial impact of elections and to ignore more complex developments.

You can't win a majority mandate unless you get back 60 per cent of the votes between the ages of 18 and 35. It's a fact.

The really amazing part, to me, was when Florida made it into the Final Four, the Democrats didn't demand a recount.

The only way you approach politics and seek elective office is to move forward. For me to look back in anger or with any rancor would be a mistake.

Democrats don't have reasons for people to vote for them. They're just trying to gin up anger and resentment for their opposition. And it's just not working anymore.

We recall Macaulay's warning that democracy would collapse when the poor used their electoral power to rob rich Peter to pay lazy Paul. Polybius expressed the same idea in 130 BC: When

National Review will support the rightwardmost viable candidate.

All this was made clear enough to the assembled industrialists and they responded with enthusiasm to the promise of the end of the infernal elections, of democracy and disarmament.

Despite all the terror and intimidation, the majority of them rejected Hitler. The Nazis led the polling with 17,277,180 votes—an increase of some five and a half million, but it comprised only 44 per cent of the total vote. A clear majority still eluded Hitler.

Among those elected that fall of 1946 was a little-known local judge, Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, to the Senate, and an even lesser known local politician in California, Richard M. Nixon, to the House. Both had accused their opponents of sympathy with Communism and of having "Communist" support. The voters had fallen for it, as they usually do in this country.

It won a commitment from the Soviet leader to take no action that would influence the 1962 congressional elections. Both the White House and the Kremlin recognized that any instance of Soviet aggression could only play into the hands of the more hawkish Republicans.

For the next few minutes Sir Peregrine's optimism seemed justified. The National Unity candidate held Oxford with a majority only slightly reduced. Braintree stayed Tory. So did Colchester and Finchley. Then at about quarter to midnight came the first results from the North. Salford, Grimsby, York and Leeds East were all held by Labour with doubled, even trebled, majorities. It was at this point that Arthur Furnival disappeared to ring his stockbroker.

Elections to the sixteenth majles were held first in the provinces, and they were conducted so dishonestly that even the British were shocked.

The problem with political jokes is they get elected.

If the gap between the qualities required for election and those essential for the conduct of office becomes too wide, the conceptual grasp and sense of history that should be part of foreign policy may be lost—or else the cultivation of these qualities may take so much of a president's first term in office as to inhibit a leading role for the United States.

When you think about a presidential candidate spending all of his or her time talking to that tiny, tiny fraction of us who have the capacity to fund political elections, it's obvious why the perspective of government is skewed relative to what most Americans care about.

Why would I be excited that a Democrat won? Seriously, over the past eight years the Democrats didn't do SHIT! Basically, the last eight years, I feel, the Republicans stood around farting; and the Democrats went "Ooh, let me smell it."

Congress is full of people who get reelected and reelected. How can you have urgency when there are all of those safe seats?

We need to address hunger, job training, justice. I can't do it alone. We need to elect people who understand the urgency.

There's no disputing that for pols, the Internet is a great way to connect with people and raise some cash and post 'Sopranos' parodies or play your opponent's macaca moments. But in a 'net root' sense, it's pretty useless for getting someone elected.

The 'vote for me because the other guy is scary,' nana-nana-poo-poo stuff I just find useless.

The president doesn't order the military to seize political opponents. He doesn't order his intelligence community to lie about national security for political purposes. He uses the military or intelligence communities to protect the United States and our citizens, not to help him win elections.

To achieve a successful transition, we don't just have to remove Maduro. We also have to rescue our institutions themselves. That's why we have set out three phases: ending Maduro's usurpation of power, implementing a transition government, and holding free elections.

In my life, I'm an expert on a few things. Losing close elections is one of them. Electric utility regulation is another. Neither is a barrel of laughs, but both have their moments.