Claire McCaskill Quotes

I understand why the Tories will be gunning for Alastair Campbell because they fear his campaigning skills.

Now, national conventions are largely an excuse for companies and party leaders to throw parties for delegates to attend, to network and have a good time.

The Republicans have a “me too” candidate running on a “yes but” platform, advised by a “has been” staff.

Ah, political physics. Someone wins an election and, poof, they are a candidate for vice president. Ridiculous.

Political parties exist to get bums on seats.

What is a democrat? One who believes that the republicans have ruined the country. What is a republican? One who believes that the democrats would ruin the country.

In every election in American history both parties have their cliches. The party that has the cliches that ring true wins.

So if 1960 had occurred under the old convention system, Kennedy would have had a very hard time getting the Democratic nomination because he would have been rejected by all those people who had worked with him in Washington.

…the fact of the Convention was the defeat of Seward rather than the nomination of Lincoln.

You win elections with coalitions. You don't win elections by ideologically cleansing your party.

It [television] has locked candidates into ridiculous positions because only ridiculous positions can be compacted into 30-second commercials.

Practical politics is the politics of the coming election.

The First Law of Politics: Never say anything in a national campaign that anyone might remember.

Painfully often the legislation our politicians pass is designed less to solve problems than to protect the politicians from defeat in our never-ending election campaigns. They are … too frightened of us to govern.

The Republicans got everything but the Democratic donkey.

Political debates, which are considered central to modern American political campaigns, appear useless as they put pressure on each candidate to put on some sort of act, to show in an impossibly brief time a superior, distinctive personality and command of the issues; the debates therefore are…fake

… the truth is Walter Mondale in 1984 had a perfectly unified campaign — every interest group was behind him …. In party politics, unity is very much overrated.

There's no question I'm going to do everything within the normal political bounds to make sure we don't nominate Donald Trump.

Let's remember that Bruce Rauner has every interest in getting stories out there that hurt Democrats.

All of these years I've been doing my program I was under the impression the Republican Party wanted to beat Democrats. And as the years have gone by, it's become obvious to me that that's not their number one objective.

The reason political party platforms are so long is that when you straddle anything it takes a long time to explain it.

We have a two-party system: The Democratic Party, which is a party of no ideas, and the Republican Party, which is a party of bad ideas.

My kids just brought home a beautiful pumpkin, but you know what? I'm going to return it because it's a Democratic pumpkin. It has the orange color of John Kerry's tan, and the roundness of Teddy Kennedy.

There's all this talk about Arnold Schwarzenegger. Well, you know where he is now? Visiting Mexico, which I think means that he is definitely going to run for governor. Arnold is smart. He's in Mexico campaigning with the very people who'll be living here by election time.