Ron Fournier Quotes

One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it's a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when a game is a colossal blowout, but you can't when it's close.

History shows that people often do cast their votes for amorphous reasons-the most powerful among them being the need for change. Just ask Bill Clinton.

As the prospect of a Tory government gets nearer, many traditional Labour voters - some who switched away in recent times and many who stayed at home - seem more determined to prevent that happening.

Three weeks is a lifetime in presidential politics. The conventional wisdom changes so suddenly.

Opinion polls often suffer on account of unexpected developments once the electoral process starts, such as the death of a political leader (as in the case of the late Rajiv Gandhi).

I have been talking to a lot of people who don't normally vote Democratic - independents and Republicans. They have been voting for Democrats because they think it's important to change the direction America is going.

In elections, the undecided vote is usually the deciding factor.

Midterm elections for first-term presidents are notoriously difficult.

It's no exaggeration to say that the undecideds could go one way or another.

The election before us will be the Austerlitz of American politics.

We all live in the moment, and we often mistakenly believe that what is true today was true always. Not so in politics, and especially in Congressional elections.

One of the enduring myths of campaign analysis is that you can actually count the number of 'undecided' voters by asking voters if they are undecided or not. Sometimes, significant numbers of voters actually change their minds.

The undecideds could go one way or the other.

It is no exaggeration to say that undecided voters could go either way.

Voters are looking for something new.

Our American elections have been fought between parties which, roughly, have represented the forces advocating change and those preferring stability.

When it comes to a mayor, they [the voters] often want whatever they haven’t just had.

We liked to think that polling and political analysis had become scientific, but this campaign changes all that.

I think every election is sui generis. I think it starts with where we are in the country at this time, with what Americans are thinking, feeling and hoping, and it proceeds from there. And it is always about the future.

Centrist voters typically decide general elections, so hard-left or hard-right platforms don't help.

Midterms behave very differently than presidential elections. Midterms, for a federal candidate, often times are a referendum on the president, where in presidential years, voters make two separate choices: one for president and one for a federal officeholder.

Independents come back, usually right before an election. They tune out, and then they start refocusing.

I mean, I got reelected in 2016. Donald Trump took Montana by 20 points. I won by four. Twenty-five to 30% of my voters voted for Donald Trump. And that's not, for me, changing who I am.

Election losses are always an inkblot test for partisans. If a candidate's defeat has no clear and obvious cause, if the data points are all over the map, it is easy for those on the sidelines to claim, 'Candidate X would have won if only he or she had been more like... me.'

The polls tell us something, but they don't tell us everything. They don't tell us how people are going to show up on Election Day.