Gary Johnson Quotes

It’s the [political] consultants’ job to take who the person is—their fixed characteristics—and leverage it.

In most of my campaigns, I find it is best not to mention my opponent by name because, by doing so, it just gives him a chance to get into the headlines.

A lot of our Democratic consultants have fallen into the self-defeating prescription that the candidate that runs the most negative ads wins. I have a new theory: Positive is the new negative.

If you can’t run against a political candidate, run against his campaign manager.

I'm not against T.V. advertising for campaigns, but we need to emphasize field campaigning much more than we do.

I've been through several of his campaigns, and I can tell you nobody can out-campaign Rick Perry.

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.

I can't ever remember sitting around and saying, 'gosh let's hurry up and get these debates going, that'll win it for me.' Nope.

When campaigns use one-word labels, typically it's meant to distract and destroy.

I supported Bob Schaffer's three races for Congress. But we all had concerns about whether he could win statewide. Then my wife suggested that I get it.

Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes.

Downplaying their faults is pretty much the point of campaigns. But we do count on them living with the constant terror of public rejection.

Review" is a great word in politics. It will last you almost an entire election cycle if you play it right.

[On political campaigns:] Get an elbow, give an elbow.

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.

Modern politics is really a battle between lawyers and marketeers.

We’re going to sell Jack like soap flakes. There are no accidents in politics.

The reason I lost the Governor’s race to Patterson is that I was out niggered. No one is ever going to out nigger me again.

Politics is television and whoever masters it is likely to win.

The 1934 Republican response to the Upton Sinclair campaign for California Governor marked a stunning advance in the art of public relations, in which advertising men now believed they could sell or destroy political candidates as they sold one brand of soap and defamed its competitor. In another twenty years, these techniques would spread East, achieve a new refinement, and begin to dominate the politics of the nation.

It is increasingly difficult to run a campaign of substance in an atmosphere which increasingly focuses on personality.

To win [elections] in this country these days you've got to campaign down to a 13-year-old's level of mental development.

A political genius is a man ... who has accidentally been on the winning side in the last campaign and is about to be on the losing side.

In a national campaign you are driven to negativism.

If you asked me, ‘Where’s the scientific evidence of what’s adding value to a campaign?,’ I’d say field organizing. But the campaign consultants who are most famous are the strategists, especially the ones who focus on TV. And that’s where the evidence of the effectiveness of anything that people do in campaigns is the most limited.