John W. Davis Quotes

I have no problem if you want to be a socialist. But for those people who are in the middle, you know, I don't know if you're really welcome in the Democratic Party, and I don't even know who the Republican Party is anymore. I have absolutely no idea.

What the hell is the sense of trying to hold the Democratic party together, if it's really a party of expediency, something that's put together every four years?

That America is in the calamity is a result of a certain amount of elitism in the Democratic Party where they're tied to the sensibility of the college-educated, multicultural crowd, of which I'm a part, which has created a sense where it's OK to say, "All the red state voters are stupid, they're all dummies, they're all racist, they're all backwards mouth-breathing knuckle-dragging ..." all that stuff. And that kind of elitism, which is first of all not true, is also not fair. It's also dumb strategy.

Democrats need to become a 50-state party. You can't have a great party on the West Coast and the East Coast. You need to have a party in all 50 states.

The Democrats often seem like the Not Republican Party, no more and no less.

You can't have a majority party in Minnesota or throughout the country without [support from] the people in these [rural] districts. Given the position [the Democratic Party] has taken, it's very hard to see how you can do that.

Democrats can have a different version of the line, or they can just say, no, we are the party of international peace and activism, and we're the party that's going to have a civilized capitalism.

There are forces within the Democratic Party who want us to sound like kinder, gentler Republicans.

I think Hillary Clinton has a lot of lee way to go, either direction, and to probably most likely try to fudge it and get both parts of the party into talking points.

I don't sense an [Barack] Obama party. I think politics is transactional for him.

If the Republican Party continues to have a different message for every different group, they're gonna die. We already have a party that does that, and they own it. It's called the Democrat Party.

Trump is dividing people against each other; he's going to try and sow racial division; so you have to figure out an answer. I think really the only answer for the Democratic Party, or for progressives at large, is to have an answer about how these people who haven't been to college, who haven't had a lot of things given to them in life, are going to do better, year after year after year.

What I'm saying is we [Democratic Party] need to get much more granular.

What I don't want to see my Democratic party do is to begin to talk down towards white men, as if their concerns are not legitimate and that we shouldn't be listening to a lot of their aspirations and hopes as well.

I think the political reality for the Democratic Party is, you know, there are two sides. There's one side saying that we weren't liberal enough and another side saying we're too liberal. I think they're both right.

You have this big challenge going on within the Democratic Party, and many of them coming into the Greens. So there is the potential for a really profound realignment here. And remember most of this is going on with most voters not having any idea who our campaign is.

Democrats don't have a lot of time to turn the party around.

I don't think the Republican Party, or I should say the Republican Party as the vehicle for modern American conservative ideas, survives with Donald Trump.

The [Democratic] party's become an urban party, and they don't get rural America. They don't get agriculture.

Democrats are not a national party. They have lost governorships, state legislatures, mayoralties. They have lost 1,500 seats since elections, 2010, '12, '14, it's been devastating. And it's all Obama.

Democrats in state legislatures are at their lowest level since the 1920s. President Obama has a can't-miss strategy to save the party in 2016. He's leaving.

The only thing I can think to do is if the Democratic Party can do what the Republicans have done, which is go in there and take control of these legislatures and governors' areas.

One of the things the Democratic Party is trying to do is take the word off-year out of our lexicon, because we've tended to be an accordion as a party. We expand in the presidentials; we shrink in between; and we scratch our head and wonder why we lose midterms.

Pundits are saying that President Obama is starting to lose support among his own party. To give you an idea of how bad it's gotten, today Jimmy Carter compared him to Jimmy Carter.

The Democratic Party will live and continue to receive the support of the majority of Americans just so long as it remains a liberal party.