Chris Hayes Quotes

A [Presidential] candidate, confident of winning or sure of losing a bare majority of a state’s popular vote has no reason to expend resources there.

Democrats have become very good at electing very bad Republicans

The most important political task facing the out-of-power party - the Democrats for now - is creating a villain to run against. It's certainly easier than developing some grand new ideas or policies on which to campaign.

It is always tough to win every booth right across the electorate because there are different issues in different parts of the electorate.

If you are a Democrat, and you get less than 90% of the black vote, you are going to likely lose your election.

In New York, we had primary elections for mayor. To improve their chances, all five candidates changed their name to Rudy Giuliani.

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.

Competition for votes sends parties in a two-party system toward the center.

Middle class voters are the mega-prize in American politics.

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

During my time as a political strategist, one of the most vexing problems was figuring out why so many people vote against their perceived interests.

Democrats should have learned in 2016 that what counts in American politics is location, not turnout.

I would say the reason that Tim Bishop electorally was able to get more votes, if you were just going to analyze registration and numbers, is that he had a quarter of the Republican vote, every election. No one is getting a quarter of the Republican vote from me.

To be clear, no one is saying there weren't any legitimate economic grievances in Trumpland, nor is anyone claiming that the economy played no role whatsoever. The point, however, is that it wasn't the major motivating factor for most Trump voters - or, at least, that's what we learn when we bother to study those voters. Race trumped economics.

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

I don't think there's any clever way for the establishment to take Donald Trump down. It's very simple. Another candidate is going to have to find a way either to out-maneuver him, or to just frankly beat him in the argument.

Jennifer Palmieri going after Kellyanne Conway and the first sound bite is a discussion of Steve Bannon and what a reprobate the Clinton people think he is and how dare you have somebody like that on your team. How dare you campaign on white supremacism. Jennifer Palmieri starts it off.

On the other hand, I think that Governor Romney has to worry that his turnout is going to be low, that he is not going to bring out the evangelicals, that he is not going to bring out the Tea Party stalwarts. If he does not, then it's pretty clear that he will lose the election. So I think turnout in key groups is going to be really, really key on Election Day.

The most effective way to beat Hillary Clinton is to remind voters of Hillary Clinton's behavior.

Trying to gin up political violence for its electoral utility is - I think inarguably what we're seeing here. And I know that the Donald Trump campaign will not say that is what they're doing.

I think that's somewhat of what the left is feeling now - that maybe I'm alone, and they're not. There are millions of us on the right that feel the same way.

There was also a sense that if he [Obama] did not win in Iowa, that it was very unlikely that he would be able to come back and win the Democratic nomination and win the general election. It was sort of an all-or-nothing bet. The stakes were that high.

Being part of the campaign, we put up front in all of Donald Trump's speeches for the last two or three weeks not the FBI but ObamaCare. That seems to me to be the thing that moved the votes in Michigan, that moved the votes in places where we otherwise Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.

People in the media often tend to assume it's like Trump and [Ted] Cruz fighting over the same voters but when you look at the people who say they're voting for Donald Trump he does as well with voters who describe themselves as moderate or liberal as he does with voters who themselves as very conservative. So, not all the Trump base would go to Cruz as a second choice.

[Kellyanne Conway]taking [Jennifer] Palmieri to school. You had a lousy candidate, you've got a candidate who's arrogant and aloof and didn't even campaign in states she thought she was gonna be coronated in. She thinks she's better than everybody else.