Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Quotes

I don't think I would have to run a campaign that's financed like General Motors.

The first thing you need to run for President is a budget of around $20 million dollars a day.

You now have six-year campaigns for the Senate - you never stop running. It's not uncommon for a member of the Senate to have a fundraising breakfast, a fundraising lunch and a fundraising dinner, and then when the Senate breaks for the week to go home, more fundraisers. And that's driven by the cost of campaigning.

If the friends of the candidate choose to go to expense for committees and canvassing [campaigning] there are no means of preventing them; but such expenses out of the candidate’s own pocket, or any expenses whatever beyond the deposit of £50 (or £100), should be illegal and punishable.

Public [campaign] financing and free television time are the things that will diminish the high influence that money has on politics.

It is now clear that giving to a candidate’s PAC is equivalent to giving to his campaign; the leaders of the PAC are, for all practical purposes, are the campaign’s bag men.

Spending for congressional campaigns is getting to be like the arms race.

We have to talk about the way we finance campaigns.

A million dollars in the presidential election is a spit in the ocean. It's not a lot of money.

The cost of congressional and presidential campaigns has been leaping every two or four years. I think this year it will be 60 percent more than 1996; well over twice as much as in 1992 in the presidential and congressional races.

They ended up spending a total, their campaign plus the independent, about 1.3 million. I only ended up spending about - not only, but I spent about 2 million. But I had no intention of doing that until I was attacked with a negative ad by an independent group.

We are told there is not enough money for education, but somehow there is enough money for people to raise billions of dollars to defeat somebody in an election? Oh! Okay! Does that make sense?

Unless our democratic philosophy is wrong, there can be no evil in a candidate spending a legally permissible and necessary sum to approach the electorate and enable them to pass an informed judgment upon his qualifications.

Where you have close races, money can make all the difference in the world.

In the end, members of the [state] legislature have to have their own organizations, raise their own money and run their own campaigns if they are ... going to win.

Congressman are spending too much time raising money.

The only way a challenger can compete with the built-in advantages of incumbency is to spend money.

Not only the candidate should not be required, he should not be permitted, to incur any but a limited and trifling expense for his election.

You have a burden going into any campaign when you're raising money to fund that effort because there's always a desire to spend more money than you have.

There probably could be some mileage in running a comparative study about how best to finance electoral campaigns around the world.

One of the greatest challenges of democracies today is the question of financing campaigns. It's a tremendous challenge. Obviously I think the solution is to have the governments pay for all the campaigns and not to have any private contributions.

It would be a lot cheaper for me not to have to raise tens of millions of dollars to elect progressive candidates who will raise my taxes.

You need a lot of money to become president.

The first thing I learned is that campaigns are about money. I had this romantic idea that campaigns were about law and debates and so forth, which is just not true. It's about money.

It is one thing to talk about fundraising and another to do it as a candidate, and I have learned so much about how much money it costs to run a campaign and what it means to raise money.