Lee Atwater Quotes

Competition for votes sends parties in a two-party system toward the center.

In terms of the ability to go out and win - this is why you have campaigns. You go out, and you take your issues to voters, and you put them out there, and people respond, or they don't.

Every election is a matter of definition.

Middle class voters are the mega-prize in American politics.

You should be strenuous in seeing as many people as possible every day of every possible class and order, for from the mere numbers of these you can make a guess of the amount of support you will get on the balloting

People try to identify who is the most likely person to turn out, and what we did is that we changed who turns out. And that changes the whole electorate.

That's what Democrats do best: breed black votes.

Progressives think the way to win is mobilizing and convince people to vote for something.

I loved campaigning.

Well, you know, what's so exciting, is that it was a really telling campaign as well. Whenever we start looking at the differences, they could never be more clear.

I not only urge you to vote that ticket yourself, but I beg that you will persuade others to do so. Personal effort can accomplish a great deal, and I beg that you will use your personal influence with your friends to get them to go with you to save the boys.

If you are tired of partisanship over patriotism, you need to vote for a change in direction.

I have been overwhelmed by the response that I have received on the doorstep during this campaign.

If Strom Thurmond could get 30% of the black vote, any Republican can.

Nobody understood better than Mr. Lincoln the obvious truth that in politics it does not suffice merely to nominate candidates. Something must also be done to elect them.

People know something has gone terribly wrong with our government and it has gotten so far off track. But people also know that there is nothing wrong in America that a good old-fashioned election can't fix.

I think there's a lot of problems with being a two-party system.

The way to help this country is to limit Republican power.

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule-- and both commonly succeed, and are right.

The election campaign is no time to get involved in very, very serious issues.

Our American elections have been fought between parties which, roughly, have represented the forces advocating change and those preferring stability.

The people who show up at the early primaries are very passionate and not much interested in compromise.

Democratic politics—that is modern mass politics—is a battlefield in which the most important move is that which decides what the battle is about, what the issue is.

One should be very careful indeed about using such loaded terms as ‘frustration,’ ‘anger,’ and especially ‘resentment’ to explain populism. One should at least face up to the political consequences of such psychologizing diagnoses — namely, that they end up confirming those people’s view of ‘liberal elites’ as being not just deeply condescending but also constitutively unable to live up to their own democratic ideals by failing to take ordinary people at their word.

I think that winning the White House is about more than just entertaining a large audience.