Jim Bolger Quotes

The very fact that I became mayor in 1977 conveys how you can't figure out what the people will do. Nobody thought I would be elected. When I entered I got four percent of the vote in the first poll, four percent.

Twenty five point leads don’t typically hold up.

When the economy is bad, the party in power is blamed. When the economy is good, people look at other issues.

Voters seem to enjoy voting for what experts believe they won't vote for.

Poll after poll has shown that a no-deal Brexit is emphatically not what the public wants - whatever the Leave campaign-staffed No 10 press office may tell lobby correspondents.

In 2010, voters certainly hit the brakes on the Obama presidency. Fast forward to the 2016 election, where voters yanked up on the emergency brake and did a donut in the parking lot. Now, the car has stopped. We sit here dizzy for a moment, looking to get on the road again.

The UKIP voter is 60 percent male, 40 percent female. Is 65 percent older than 55 and 35 percent younger than 55. It's not hard to work out. Some have been Labor. Some have been Tories. The most difficult thing is previous voting intention, because they're coming from across the board.

Hillary Clinton should get a bounce out of her convention, I mean a bounce in the polls. I think it's probably conceded that Donald Trump got about a three-point bounce out of his conventions. He's closed the gap that much.

This is partly a function of approval ratings. People pay attention [to polls] and start saying, 'Lets take a more independent tack.' It is frankly self-interest, self-preservation.

Nobody looks at opinion polls with more attention than politicians, but of course you've got to remember that a single poll is a snapshot in time.

The public still ultimately determines what happens to you politically, by virtue of the casting of their vote ... and you cannot ever predict what will move the public in one direction or another.

The majority of American voters have rejected both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

I'm convinced Mr. Reagan would never be elected- I don't think his views are held by a majority of the American people...it's the Republican party that's going to be committing suicide by nominating candidates of that genre.

People tell me, "Well, you understand where the voters are, Jeff, where the votes are, or what people are thinking," and they'll sort of - in a complimentary way. And it's a bit of an acknowledgement that we've been blind to some of these issues for too long.

You had a majority of Americans saying that [Donald Trump] would take the country in the right direction or I think he would make real change, real change.

Being part of the campaign, we put up front in all of Donald Trump's speeches for the last two or three weeks not the FBI but ObamaCare. That seems to me to be the thing that moved the votes in Michigan, that moved the votes in places where we otherwise Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.

Seventy-five percent of voters now [in September 2016], according to the latest poll, want third-party candidates included in the debate. We have the highest disapproval and distrust rates ever in our history for these two presidential candidates, which the system is doing everything it can to force down our throats.

There is a reason the Democrats have had only two Presidents since 1968 and have managed to lose control of both houses of Congress in recent years. There is a reason they keep snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. And it's not fraud and it's not dirty politics and it's not stupid voters. It's the plain and simple fact that the majority of those who vote don't like them.

The American people have now spoken, but it's going to take a little while to determine what they've said.

The public will not forgive us if their wish to leave is subject to a bitter and a divisive Conservative Party leadership race between Remain and Leave camps.

On March 8 a poll showed Hart 9 points ahead of Reagan. So perhaps 60 million Americans, 55 million of whom had not heard of Hart a month ago, have suddenly decided thay want him to be leader of the free world. The public mind is not just soft wax, it's runny.

Most often the electorate votes for change.

So what we have is an American foreign policy that is inextricably linked to domestic matters. It is very dangerous for a politician who desires nothing more than to stay in office to address the mindset that any change in policy is appeasement. And Americans will accept that for a certain amount of time.

When I ran against George Bush Sr. in 1992, and we did very well in New Hampshire, and then we went on to California, it was four, five months later, I got 30 percent in the counties in Southern California, because Californians wanted us to do something about thousands of people walking into our country on weekends, and the president of the United States and the government of the United States, unlike General Eisenhower who dealt with it, did nothing. And that's what Trump is riding.

I do think Brexit vote speaks to the ongoing changes and challenges that are raised by globalisation.