Howard Fineman Quotes

If a candidate for office starts talking about thinning the deer population or investing in barriers to reduce the number of deer on the highways, the other side will probably just ignore him, because they're not going to know what to say about it. But there is a chance that the issue will resonate with voters in an unexpected way.

I know how to run a nationally paced campaign.

Just a few months ago in the Republican primary Mitt Romney said to his opponents, who he was crushing at the time, stop whining. And I think that's a good message for the Romney campaign. Instead of whining about what the Obama campaign is saying, why don't you just put the facts out there and let people decide rather than trying to hide them.

When I first started talking about running for office, a lot of people said to me, 'Don't let the consultants change you,' and I'd always assured them that I wouldn't allow it to happen. But like it or not, I had to change. Not because of a consultant, but because I started to understand the cost of a stupid mistake.

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

For somebody who's never run for office before, Donald Trump understands that old axiom, "Define yourself before you're defined."

It just never comes across as a quality you want in a president that you're sitting in a room. It's almost as if they woke up and realized, You know, we're running against a former secretary of state. Our guy used to do the Miss Universe pageant around the world. Maybe we should try to heavy this up.

Microtargeting, as its name implies, is a way to identify small but crucial groups of voters who might be won over to a given side, and which messages would do the trick.

We must invest in and empower our state and local parties by creating effective field operations, an enhanced and advanced voter file, and a culture of collaboration between candidates at every level. Let's put the voters first.

The weakness that our campaign and that I had is we weren't effective in taking my message primarily to minority voters.

In the U.S. - and elsewhere - successful parties need a storyline that voters can relate to, an intelligible plot of some sort, especially now that so many older, formal ideologies have lost force. For proof of this, one has only to look at Margaret Thatcher's career and ideas.

As an opinion manager, a campaign consultant, fixing personality negatives is a lot easier than fixing character negatives.

We understand that we're going to be outspent. But we still think we can win decisively because there's some things money can't buy. Among these are votes.

The truth is, you cannot run a political campaign like a tech startup. Technology is a field that fetishizes disruption. The old ways are suspect, and we place an almost irrational trust on new tools. That's fine for developing games, but it was a failing playbook for politics.

After Mitt Romney's defeat, the RNC released its official assessment of what happened - a failure to reach younger voters, nonwhite voters, women - but was met with a counter-narrative that, in fact, it was Romney's failure to be conservative enough that led to a depressed Republican base.

This is the extreme left's problem in both television and in politics. Whether it be lousy ratings on TV or getting votes, if you don't listen to and understand Americans, you'll pay the price at the ballot box.

A central task for any campaign is to develop a narrative: a short, simple story explaining where we are, how we got here and where we need to go.

I made it clear that I can run a positive campaign and do it better.

A campaign adviser can change the outside appearance of the candidate, but the ideology and personality of the candidate remains the same.

The lesson of the Scott Walker, Rick Perry, and Bobby Jindal failures is simple: You can't run a presidential campaign from the undercard stage.

To defeat Donald Trump, the Democrats must run a stellar cast of all-stars in their primary.

The Democratic Party has to transform itself. We can't just pop up every two or four years and hope people will support us.

I've always said the left needs to be ready for government.

Out go the bad memories of [Kamala Harris’] association with Joe Biden, and in come the gauzy slogans about “our future,” the “contagious power of hope,” and “fighting on behalf of people who need a voice and a champion.” Ms. Harris is no longer the Vice President who failed to secure the border. She’ll now be tough on illegal migration. She’s no longer the Veep who said “Bidenomics is working” while inflation reached a 40-year high. She’s now the candidate who will reduce your family’s food bill by going after your grocer for “price gouging.” She’s no longer the candidate of 2020 who questioned the need for cash bail and blamed police for urban violence. She’s now the tough prosecutor who as California Attorney General dared to investigate . . . Exxon. She’s no longer the presidential candidate of 2019 who wanted to ban fracking, endorsed Medicare for All, and questioned whether the current Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency should exist. Her campaign suggests she’s changed her views on all that, although she hasn’t said why—or even been asked. Americans are expected to take her expedient leap from the left to the center on faith.

I think the president's quite comfortable being the underdog. I think he's happy to run this race from - as if he were behind the whole time.