Michael Heseltine Quotes

Most pundits regard an election year session as an opportunity for the two parties to frame issues and garner political advantage in advance of the approaching election.

Sometimes when I listen to fellow progressives, I wonder if the only lesson we took away from the '04 elections is that politics is a word game.

The fact that the Conservatives are losing voters to UKIP while struggling to attract those who voted for other parties in 2010 suggests they have still not successfully shown what a Conservative government is for. This needs to be done on a broad front in a way that encompasses the economy and public services.

One of the problems we saw in the last presidential election in our party is that our nominee, while winning the election, which we ought never to forget, often lost sight of the difference between strategy and tactics.

How it is that within 60 days of a general election issue, groups can no longer tell voters that a Member of Congress votes pro-abortion, against guns, against the environment or whatever else is beyond me.

Practical politics is the politics of the coming election.

When you run a campaign the idea is not to appeal to pundits but to appeal to people.

Democratic politics—that is modern mass politics—is a battlefield in which the most important move is that which decides what the battle is about, what the issue is.

The biggest problem for the Republican Party has never been its primary calendar, its campaign tactics, or a lack of trainings. The party's biggest problem is what it believes, what it says, and how it governs.

When a party loses a national election to someone such as President Trump, it's time to rethink everything.

It is quite acceptable for either party to explicitly go after the black, Hispanic, or even the Jewish vote. In fact both parties gain an indispensable moral authority by doing so.

Democrats fell in love with the idea that winning elections was a matter of talking to voters about the one issue we think impacts them, instead of our plan to move the country forward as a whole.

Political parties could learn a lot from pro wrestling, as we have our passionate base, too, but we don't necessarily gear our show around them.

After helping the Republican National Committee address some of the troubling deficiencies the party faced after 2012, as outlined in its so-called autopsy report, and witnessing some real progress in our outreach to women in the ensuing years, I did not expect an egomaniacal arsonist to come along and set all that ablaze.

Over the years, Democrats have had a lot of very talented individuals, but they have lacked fighters.

Democrats are very good at governing. When it comes to messaging, I'm not too sure about.

Essentially, how do you go after [Donald] Trump to have a real shot of taking back control of Congress in 2018? Democrats will need to energize not only their base, but also pick up actual swing voters who could be turned off from President Trump.

I think Republicans need to do a better job of reaching out to everyone in the United States. Politics is always about getting the support of the majority of our people.

The Conservative Party have got to ask themselves, 'How do we persuade people who at the moment are voting Labour and Liberal Democrat to vote Conservative

The people the Republicans should reach out to are the white votes, the white voters who didn't vote in the last election. The propagandists are leading us down the wrong path.

The key to winning any general election in the USA is to excite your base and then expand your base - get independent voters and voters who haven't been voting for your party to come to your party.

The Social Democrats have to listen to people who are attracted to the AfD party. That isn't a mistake at all. You can also win them back. Of course, there are a lot of angry voters who are ideologically charged. But there are also a lot of quieter voters who plan on voting AfD to send a message. We can never give up on them.

Hillary Clinton says one thing herself, but she has other people who are floating her plans.

It is an article of faith with the Democrats that they must fool Americans by simulating agreement with normal people. The winner of the Democratic primary is always the candidate who does the best impersonation of an American.

Some of Donald Trump's gifts that obviously allowed him to execute one of the biggest political upsets in history, those are ones that hopefully he will put to good use on behalf of all the American people.