Michael Beschloss Quotes

I will continue to work with the Republican Party to try to encourage primaries.

Securing the Republican nomination is an intricate series of steps that requires a comprehensive strategy.

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.

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.

Iowa caucuses have been a graveyard for hawkish Democrats.

The convention will be dead-locked, and after the other candidates have gone their limit, some twelve or fifteen men, worn-out and bleary-eyed for lack of sleep, will sit down about two in the morning around a table in a smoke-filled room in some hotel and decide the nomination. When that time comes [Warren Gamaliel] Harding will be selected.

The political parties have no role except to stage the conventions, where you celebrate a decision that's already been made elsewhere.

In the Democratic party they call the people who lost the last election losers. In the Republican party, we call them the next nominee.

In our system today, many people don’t have to win general elections; they just have to win primaries.

Caucus

I think we should have the majority of the party's voters decide who they want as their nominee.

You have to listen to people that have chosen the nominee of our Republican Party. I think it would be foolish to ignore them.

Caucuses are different than primaries, and winner-take-all primaries are how Mitt Romney eventually took over Newt Gingrich in 2012 and why Rick Santorum left.

The good thing about having a Republican primary is that the voters will decide our nominee - unlike the Democrats.

Originally, the main purpose of the convention was to determine who the party would have as the presidential nominee and the vice-presidential nominee.

I've been watching politics for 35 or 40 years and you just never know. You can have one person win the Iowa caucus and then the whole picture changes ten minutes later. The same thing can happen again after New Hampshire. I have no idea what's going to happen with our country in the future.

Oftentimes during the period in which conventions really did business, you had situations where the delegates were divided and you would have ballot after ballot before there was a final nominee.

The initial attraction of a political convention was that often the outcome was not preordained. There was at least some element of surprise. But, now it's like tuning in to a movie where you already know the plot and the ending. It's just not that interesting.

I may not be the favourite candidate of some people within the Republican establishment, but the voters made a decision.

Despite what the pundits want us to think, contested primaries aren't civil war, they are democracy at work, and that's beautiful.

The Minnesota Republican hierarchy didn't want me to run against their incumbent in 2000; they didn't know who I was. And once many party bigwigs did get to know me, they weren't sure that I could win the seat.

As parties began to develop around the turn of the 19th century, you had party nominees for President nominated in caucuses made up of party members in Congress.

In my years working in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, I had learned that those who seek the presidency are prepared to stop at almost nothing to get their party’s nomination.

A caucus is basically an undemocratic method of selecting a candidate.

Any man who can carry a Republican primary is a man.