Barack Obama Quotes

To let the people know there was life beyond Shirley Dean, we decided to focus on voter registration; each day I set up my card table somewhere in the district, signed people up, and passed out noses.

Democrats in 2020 can't just drive by red counties. You have to stop, get out of your car, ask for people's votes, and engage with them on issues that relate to their lives.

I meet party workers. This is a must because it helps me understand the problems and issues of voters at the district level.

For almost 20 years, I've worked on various campaigns. I started out as a phone volunteer. I'd go into campaign offices, ask for lists of Native American voters, and just start calling people because I felt that I just wanted to help more Native folks get to the polls.

It's about grass-roots campaigning, meeting voters face-to-face, and above all, listening to what they have to say.

When you walk into a field office, you have many opportunities. We'll hand you a call sheet. You can make calls. You can knock on doors, and they'll have these stacks there for you. They'll say: 'Harper, you've knocked on 50 doors. That's great. Here's how you compare to the rest of them.' But it's all very offline.

I could not find any way that we could really run the kind of campaign I wanted to run if we were targeting delegates and still trying to talk to people, which is what keeps me going as a human being.

I probably enjoy campaigning more than most other people in public office because I like people and I enjoy going out there and telling people what I've done.

Nobody understood better than Mr. Lincoln the obvious truth that in politics it does not suffice merely to nominate candidates. Something must also be done to elect them.

I'm on the ground, I've been in swing states, I've been talking to the American people, I've been out there speaking on behalf of Obama's record, I've been in the trenches.

You don't win elections on Election Day. You win them by what you do all year round, by the day-to-day good will you generate in each precinct.

I ring 8,000 to 10,000 doorbells every time I run.

You should be strenuous in seeing as many people as possible every day of every possible class and order, for from the mere numbers of these you can make a guess of the amount of support you will get on the balloting

I ran for chairman of the Democratic Party to win elections.

You can't win an election unless you have a message.

I went to the Women's Campaign School at Yale; I went to Eleanor Roosevelt Legacy Training, women's campaign fund training. I got to know the district really well by talking to the county chair, getting to know politics, working on some local races.

Republicans need to stop making assumptions, and they need to start talking to younger people, people of color, and ask them - not talk to them - ask them, 'What is it that we can do better? How do we earn your vote? How do we earn the ability for you to see that we can be the party that will make your life better and that of your children?'

You build massive databases, you learn everything you can about the people in those databases, you figure out exactly how they can be useful to your campaign, and you ask them to donate money, door-knock, the virtual equivalent of being a sort of army of stamp lickers.

I think I had a superb campaign team. And I know it's always expected that if you lose, people point to the campaign team and say, 'Gee, they didn't do their job well.' If you win, they're all brilliant. And the team, in my view, did a superb job.

You have to knock doors, make calls, and build a relationship with voters long before Election Day.

I don't necessarily see myself as an activist, running down the street and knocking at every door.

Bill de Blasio is a very good friend. I remember bringing up a whole caravan of cars to help volunteer on his Public Advocate race.

Look, we are building out a large coalition program from Latinos for Trump, Black Voices for Trump, the faith-based, all kinds of different coalitions. That's an important thing for us to do. We need to turn out those voters.

One of the big learnings both out of the referendum, and out of 2017 general election is that parties that don't have a professional network on the ground slightly lose the ability to hear what local people are saying, so we've reestablished our network of campaign managers out in the field.

The basic job of any campaign is to translate grassroots energy into turnout.