Ann Richards Quotes

Frankly, I thought we would have lost the House by now.

Republican pundits always believe Republicans are going to win; Democratic pundits always believe Democrats are going to win.

A political genius is a man ... who has accidentally been on the winning side in the last campaign and is about to be on the losing side.

Democratic strategists and operatives should not design a strategy based off today's conditions. They should be setting a strategy for where the trajectory of polling is headed.

I think there are a lot of factors going into an election. I think the bottom line is - is that Donald Trump is gonna be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America. And it's not necessarily profitable to sort of try to untangle all the different factors that went into it.

If the state polls are right, then Mr. Obama will win the Electoral College. If you can't acknowledge that after a day when Mr. Obama leads 19 out of 20 swing-state polls, then you should abandon the pretense that your goal is to inform rather than entertain the public.

Pressure for the most part comes from this overarching concern that if I head into the election season without sufficient resources, then any outside group, any individual, any super PAC may choose to come in to my district and overwhelm it and take over the airwaves and control the debate.

As a Democrat following the 2012 presidential election closely, I was happy to see that South Carolina voted overwhelmingly for Newt Gingrich, a candidate almost too easy for President Barack Obama to beat in the fall. I was not, however, surprised at the state's gaffe.

If no one can do that, yeah, Donald Trump better man the lifeboats, because there's some significant chance he'll win the nomination.

The people who cast the votes decide nothing; the people who count the votes decide everything.

If we had known we were going to win control of the Senate, we'd have run better candidates.

How about if I had two people in the race? The number would've been twice as good. In other words, people with 2 million people. Because the Republican party increased.

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.

I believe devoutly that the national election is the closest thing we have to a civic sacrament of democracy. And I really do think that heed must be paid, and when people make a decision, those who are on the other side, including me, accept it, for that reason.

And, when the votes are counted, let everybody, including the candidates, get into a good humor as quick as they got into a bad one.

There was nothing that said the road to popular vote. Hey guys, we won. You don't have to respond.

The marketplace measurement in politics is something called an election. It's a pretty good barometer - it's transparent, it's numerical, it's objective. It gives you a pretty good measure of what your customers think of you. And in 2006 and 2008, the marketplace was telling the Republicans, We prefer the products and services of your competitors. And so when you're losing market share, you step back and say, What can we do differently?

We have got to lose the primary in order to win the general.

It's been an unusual election [2016].

I'm a bit of a political geek anyway, so you tend to write how you think the rhythms of an administration will go.

I even believe [Donald Trump] won a little after - after the election rethinking, I think if we'd spent a little more time in Minnesota, we would've won Minnesota.

The only truly shocking thing about last Tuesday's election is that the Democrats didn't do far worse, or as badly as they deserved.

Yeah, well, that's not how you win the presidency, you dummkopfs. You get 270 electoral votes, and we got 306. Kellyanne [Conway] now explains how Republicans crushed Democrats all over the country. This is the thing that I don't think they've come to grips with yet.

No one is predicting that the Democrats will get the 30 pickups they need to take back the House majority.

I'm angry that George Bush got to be in the White House, and I'm angry that [Al] Gore wasn't able to be a better candidate after eight years of a great economy and being an incumbent.