Jo Swinson Quotes

In addition to the decline in competition, American politics today is characterized by a growing ideological polarization between the two major political parties.

The Republican and Democratic parties have accomplished an amazing feat with the red state/blue state paradigm. They've convinced everyone that regardless of how bad they are, the other guy is worse.

The field of politics always presents the same struggle. There are the Right and the Left, and in the middle is the Swamp. The Swamp is made up of know-nothings, of them who are without ideas, of them who are always with the majority.

Only in Washington can the pursuit of a conservative agenda, with centrist policies, be depicted as liberal reform.

I'm not going to be the rock star of the far right and frankly on the rock star of the far left.

While their fiscal views aren't mine, the moderates are the last reasonable voice in the current Republican Party.

British politics is more nuanced. Part of the problem with New Labour is that they are a moving target.

When New Labour came to power, we got a Right-wing Conservative government. I came to realise that voting Labour wasn't in Scotland's interests any more. Any doubt I had about that was cast aside for ever when I saw Gordon Brown cosying up to Margaret Thatcher in Downing Street.

I say Republicans aren't right all the time. Democrats aren't wrong all the time - now, maybe most of the time, but not all the time.

So the - the part of the problem is not just the rhetoric. It's the fact that we - we're so polarized in what we've done to each other as parties over the last thirty years in redistricting that it's very, very hard to overcome your own constituencies and move to the middle.

I think it has done us more harm believing in the huge differences between left and right, Democrat and Republican.

The left has lost touch with popular opinion, thereby making it possible for the right to present itself as the party of common sense.

Nothing ever stays in the middle. You always go from one extreme to the other, and politics is certainly that way.

Well, the tough thing for them is that the Republican primary is pretty far over to the right, just as the Democratic primary is further over to the left than the average voter in each party.

Americans are probably more in line than ever before. We're more moderate than we are liberal or conservative.

But instead, Democrats are so bent on seeing Republicans as a bunch of angry, right wing, intolerant, unreliable extremists that they have a track record of missing the mood of the country, especially the sentiment of people who don't wake up to 'The New York Times.'

The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to doctrinaire and academic thinkers.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

Liberals and the Democratic Party are demonic.

As far as party primaries are concerned, both Republican and Democratic Party primaries are dominated by the most zealous voters, whose views may not reflect the views of most members of their own respective parties, much less the views of those who are going to vote in the November general election. In recent times, each election year has seen each party's nominee selected - or at least subject to veto - by its most extreme wing and then forced to try to move back to the center before the general election. This can only undermine the public's confidence in the integrity of the candidates of both parties.

At the end of the day, Democrats go out and appeal to 30 percent of the far left; Republicans go out and appeal to 30 percent of the far right. Hey, there's a big middle ground here that's not represented. I think that, Bill Weld and myself, I think the Libertarian Party really occupies that ground.

I think liberals would love to see the conservative party be more moderate, more middle of the road. I mean, my gosh, what do you call John McCain? Some would argue, what do you call Mitt Romney?

You will never satisfy the far extremes on the Left and the Right.

We need to tell the far-right and the far-left to go away and have people in the center solve the problem.

Nigel Farage, the leader of the U.K. Independence Party, is a true populist; Senator Bernie Sanders, the former U.S. presidential candidate who campaigned for Hillary Clinton after losing his battle for the Democratic Party's nomination, is not.