Campaign Costs Quotes

If the friends of the candidate choose to go to expense for committees and canvassing [campaigning] there are no means of preventing them; but such expenses out of the candidate’s own pocket, or any expenses whatever beyond the deposit of £50 (or £100), should be illegal and punishable.

It is one thing to talk about fundraising and another to do it as a candidate, and I have learned so much about how much money it costs to run a campaign and what it means to raise money.

I think we have a number of young people - like yourself - who want to make a difference. I'm not sure the numbers are as large because I think the burden of getting elected to public office at the national level has become astronomically expensive.

Campaigns are so much more expensive than people think they are. Just to keep the lights on is several thousand dollars a month.

If you aren't willing to use your own money [for campaigning], you ought to think about something else.

The decision in McCutcheon v. FEC is a devastating blow in efforts to rein in out-of-control costs of campaigns.

Now unless you have billions of dollars, it's impossible to reach tens of millions of American people no matter how hard you campaign.

A million dollars in the presidential election is a spit in the ocean. It's not a lot of money.

You now have six-year campaigns for the Senate - you never stop running. It's not uncommon for a member of the Senate to have a fundraising breakfast, a fundraising lunch and a fundraising dinner, and then when the Senate breaks for the week to go home, more fundraisers. And that's driven by the cost of campaigning.

If you're following candidates in a campaign, you get on their plane, and what they're generally doing is they're dividing the cost of that charter flight by the number of reporters they're carrying aboard. In effect, the press is buying them that campaign flight.

Politics has got so expensive that it takes lots of money to even get beat with.

These endless legal challenges that define elections in New York are a joke in this country, and they are the reason why it is so expensive, or one of the reasons, it's so expensive to run here and why so many people decide not to run.

I'm beholding to nobody, I've spent you know, tens and tens of millions of dollars on the campaign.

The way we fund campaigns is a feminist issue and a race issue. If you want more representation, you can't say it's going to be really expensive to run for office and you need a rolodex of billionaires.

I don't think I would have to run a campaign that's financed like General Motors.

Vermont is such a small state, and the most money that's ever been spent in the history of political campaigns there is $2 million. That number is going to be surpassed many times. Vermont remains a "cheap state" for the Republican National Committee. So putting $5 or $10 million into Vermont - compared to New York or California or Illinois - that's small potatoes.

One of the greatest challenges of democracies today is the question of financing campaigns. It's a tremendous challenge. Obviously I think the solution is to have the governments pay for all the campaigns and not to have any private contributions.