Michael Wolff Quotes

The last thing you want to do is read the latest poll and then make policy.

It is contrary to political precedent for the voters to kick out an administration in time of prosperity.

I didn’t think that I would ever get elected. After all, you don’t vote for somebody who is attacking Santa Claus.

I don't look at polls.

Electoral contests have nothing but polls, which is why people have grown so obsessed with them; we're desperate for an objective rendering of what is happening and what may happen.

Voters quickly forget what a man says.

I think the American people should express their preferences, and we'll accept their choice.

There were a number of referendums in '98 that most of the things I voted for passed. That's very satisfying when you feel that most of the country is in step with your views.

There are elections in which everyone knows that 'the people have spoken' but they don't always know exactly what the people have said. This November's election was different. Not only did the people speak, they spoke clearly.

The very fact that I became mayor in 1977 conveys how you can't figure out what the people will do. Nobody thought I would be elected. When I entered I got four percent of the vote in the first poll, four percent.

I don't think the American people, if you look historically, elect angry candidates.

The British electors will not vote for a man who doesn’t wear a hat.

Polls are only good for dogs.

It is now possible to say that the judgment of the people has often been wiser than the judgment of Congressmen or even of the experts. For one thing, the public has no axes to grind. Pressure groups aren't at work on the general public, as they are on legislators.

I'd rather be underestimated by the polltakers than by the voters.

I have been defeated for election often enough to know that the majority can be wrong.

I have never seen a poll elect anyone

No politician is any longer interested in the question whether a measure is fit to produce the ends aimed at. What alone counts for him is whether the majority of the voters favor or reject it.

Public Policy Polling asked a broad sample of Democratic and Republican primary voters whether they would support bombing Agrabah. Nearly a third of Republican respondents said they would, versus 13 percent who opposed the idea. Democratic preferences were roughly reversed; 36 percent were opposed, and 19 percent were in favor. Agrabah doesn’t exist. It’s the fictional country in the 1992 Disney film Aladdin. Liberals crowed that the poll showed Republicans’ aggressive tendencies. Conservatives countered that it showed Democrats’ reflexive pacifism. Experts in national security couldn’t fail to notice that 43 percent of Republicans and 55 percent of Democrats polled had an actual, defined view on bombing a place in a cartoon.

You have to be ready for anything. It's a good reminder about democracy. Voters can tell you to carry on, or chuck you out. You've got to be ready for both.

Polls can change; people's opinions can change. Voting intentions can change, and I think it would be a silly leader, a silly political party, that would assume that we have it sewn up.

I don't put a lot of stock into polls.

I don't pay a lot of attention to polls.

The polls tell us something, but they don't tell us everything. They don't tell us how people are going to show up on Election Day.

Voters have demonstrated time and again that candidates who buck the teachers' union are rewarded.