Chris Matthews Quotes

Today, unfortunately, the right to vote seems to have become a partisan issue. Democrats seek to guarantee and expand voting rights. Republicans try to undermine and suppress voting rights.

Voter suppression laws, overzealous filibuster use, you name it - the Republicans use every tactic they can to stop our democracy from actually selecting the person with the most support.

If you're black in this country, if you're a woman in this country, if you are any minority in this country at all, what could possibly possess you to vote Republican?

I am not interested in splitting the white vote.

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.

The 3rd leg of the strategy for GOP political supremacy has been to suppress the vote of the Democrat’s most loyal base: African Americans. On the fallacious pretext of addressing voter fraud, Republican officials in more than two dozen states introduced and passed new voting laws that that restrict voting. The most immediate impact of these laws has been to disproportionately disenfranchise Black, Latino and young voters.

Voter suppression in Florida in 2000 helped put Republican George W Bush into office despite losing the popular vote and the targeting of state legislative elections in 2010 enabled Republicans to gerrymander states out of Democrat reach.

Redistricting reform is one of the most important issues we can tackle.

Republicans in the South... are trying to find ways, not so much to block black and brown people from voting, but to block black and brown people from getting people they want elected, which is a far more subtle thing to do.

Curtailing voting rights by dishonestly inventing widespread fraud has been a major part of the Republican Party's political strategy for a while.

Supporters of tough voter ID laws are not afraid of vote fraud - they are afraid of democracy.

Blacks as a group have voted Democratic since the 1930s. The GOP has not courted them in any real way since the 1960s, focusing instead on attracting white constituencies hostile to civil rights and African-Americans in general.

The Supreme Court 2013 ruling that gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act set in motion what many feared: the subjection of minorities, seniors, and low-income Americans to unfair, punitive barriers preventing them from exercising their most basic right as American citizens.

The Republicans are looking at a country that is going to be a majority minority country in just over a generation. And they are an increasingly white party.

The white backlash has been at work for a long time. It's been part and parcel of the Republican Party for the last 25 years or so, and it's been highly successful up until Barack Obama was ingeniously able to come up with strategies to deal with it.

Black folks in America are telling one party, 'We don't give a damn about you.' They're telling the other party, 'You've got our vote.' Therefore, you have labeled yourself 'disenfranchised' because one party knows they've got you under their thumb. The other party knows they'll never get you and nobody comes to address your interest.

It's really hard to be a black Republican. I see what they go through. It's a good little trick the entire mainstream media has pulled by describing Republicans as "Racist! Racist! Racist!" and then turning around and laughing at us for not having more blacks in our party.

Grace Bell lived in Belhaven, North Carolina her entire life, all 100 years of her life. Just a few weeks ago Republicans challenged her voter registration status and tried to remove her from the voter rolls. Now Grace got her voter registration reinstated. And you better believe she's going to vote. But this 100-year old woman wasn't alone in being targeted. The list of voters Republicans tried to purge was two-thirds black and Democratic. That didn't happen by accident.

Marvel Comics announced that the next Captain America will be black. He has the same powers as white Captain America, except he has to show I.D. when he votes.

Democratic Party are totalitarian, authoritarians who - when you get right down to it - are showing everybody they have no respect for the democratic process, and they want no part of it. They are trying to undermine it. This isn't insecurity. This is dangerous!

They believe the less votes the better. Republicans like to suppress votes because they believe they do better in small turnouts. Characteristically, Democrats would rather lose an election with a huge turnout than win one with a small turnout because we think that the values of democracy have to be placed above the interests of the party. The reason that Republicans are such failures at governing is because they place the interests of their party ahead of the interests of the country.

On the one hand, to suggest that white poll watchers are going to black communities threatening and provocative. On the other hand is to suggest that if that same line of vote is he also resists making a commitment to honor the winner of the campaign, that there is another agenda.

The Republican Party, in many ways, grew up as a reaction to that [ segregation], and a lot of people have misunderstood that.

I spent many years working for voting rights, but we still see sophisticated efforts, led by white officials, to disenfranchise black voters in local and national elections.

There are more Negroes in jail with me than there are on the voting rolls.