Stephanie Herseth Quotes

In my opinion, the polarization of our politics has mostly been brought about by the massive infusion of money—mostly spent on negative advertising that create divisions among the population that watches television and the two parties.

The dominant advertising advantage of Clinton, with spending of 10 to 1 over Trump, reinforced the perception that she was trying to buy, rather than earn, votes.

Certainly we're going to continue to see those commercials that I call 30-second drive-by shootings. And they're going to have a lot of money to do it. But we're going to combat it.

Unfortunately, money in politics is an insidious thing - and a loophole in our campaign finance system was taken advantage of with money going to existing or new 527 groups with the sole purpose of influencing the election.

In 1988, as an unknown candidate, totally unknown, I won Iowa, came in second in New Hampshire, won South Dakota. I was ahead in every Super Tuesday state the day after South Dakota. The only problem was I didn't have enough money. I had a million dollars left, and Al Gore had three and Michael Dukakis had three and it was lights out.

Rule of Dark Matter: SuperPAC dollars cannot be seen by most voters but account for most of the money in this universe.

Polls move money as much as money moves polls.

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

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

Members of Congress are never in town any more. They’re so busy raising money that they leave Thursday night and don’t return till Monday night. Tuesday through Thursday are now long days, so there is no time anymore for bipartisan socialization.

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

You can’t get to be an officeholder in America without buying television time.

While American democracy is imperfect, few outside the majority of this court would have thought its flaws included a dearth of corporate money in politics.

Most important of all the structural reforms, we need to follow through on the recent Congressional effort to discipline the use of money in politics, by setting reasonable limits on campaign spending, limiting and publicizing individual and organizational gifts and channeling much more of the money (including … all general election spending) through the respective party committees rather than through individual candidates’ treasuries.

The paid political campaign managers are the problem [with modern campaigns.] They are overpaid for doing the wrong things.

Spending limits have proven a monumental failure at limiting campaign spending in presidential elections, merely diverting the money underground.

People spend money on negative campaigning because it works.

The Koch brothers are spending more money against me than I've been able to raise.

It's hurting Democrats if you do really go profoundly negative in the primary. Most of them don't. They actually realize the most effective use of their money is to make sure they stand out in front of the voters and the voters understand their story.

It's gotta be hard when you are a newcomer to this kind of thing, this big political scene and you have somebody like Michael Bloomberg come in with hundreds of millions of dollars, dumping it in.

There's no one silver bullet, but money really is the root of all evil. The single biggest problem is how much more money is flooding into politics these days. It not only tends to enable a more extreme candidate to get elected, but because so much money is required to bankroll a campaign, everyone spends all their free time fundraising instead of reaching across the aisle.

I am willing to undergo the disadvantage in order to make certain that in the future we shall reduce the power of money in politics..

We live in a country where Wall Street owns Washington.

In a national campaign you are driven to negativism.

Money has become much, much too important in the election process. I felt that way when I had no money, and I feel that way when I do have money.