Barack Obama didn't get elected president, would never have been elected president, had he decided to run as a black candidate. In order to reach the broadest number of people you have to speak to their interests as broadly as you can.
When you run a campaign the idea is not to appeal to pundits but to appeal to people.
Hillary [Clinton] had started running a million-dollar ad campaign trying to define [Donald] Trump as temperamentally unfit for the office and intellectually unfit. No experience. It's dangerous to let Trump anywhere near the nuclear codes and the push button and so forth.
The First Law of Politics: Never say anything in a national campaign that anyone might remember.
At the organisational level, our party has to really develop a new style of connecting with the people. We have to also look at the way we project our programmes, our policies.
I'm a marketeer, and I thought the message discipline in the Leave campaign was extraordinary.
In a political campaign, you take your position; you stay strong with it. And the Clinton campaign put out tons of stuff that was not true about Donald Trump and who President Trump is.
Mrs. [Hillary] Clinton is focusing on a different part of the voters trying to influence them in her own way as well; so they attack each other [with Donald Trump].
If you don't have a record to run on, you paint your opponent as someone to run from.
What I have learned over hundreds of campaigns is if you have lost voters who have supported you in the past, you can get them back. If you never had them, it is a very difficult sell.
You've got to attract interest in your candidate. The problem when you're running far behind is that you've got to move through those positive phases very quickly. Then, you have to draw attention to the other guy. You've got to create interest in why you differ from him and you've got to create a desire to remove him.
Hillary Clinton is trying an entirely different approach with Iowa than the one she tried eight years ago when she lost there. She will not start speeches by saying, 'Hello, Iowa, or Idaho, or whichever one you are.'
Never say anything in a national campaign that anyone might remember.
I do think Hillary Clinton should have pivoted and say, I am change, I am change, because people do want some change.
Just a few months ago in the Republican primary Mitt Romney said to his opponents, who he was crushing at the time, stop whining. And I think that's a good message for the Romney campaign. Instead of whining about what the Obama campaign is saying, why don't you just put the facts out there and let people decide rather than trying to hide them.
"Perceive" is the word that became in the '72 campaign what "charisma" was for the 1960, '64 and even the '68 campaigns. "Perceive" is the new key word. When you say perceive you imply the difference between what the candidate is and the way the public or the voters see him.
Every dollar not spent is another dollar you have to reach the voters and convey a message.
The New York Times and Politico report , as Bush continues to flounder on the campaign trail, backers are placing some of the blame on Right To Rise and its inability to sell their candidate.
We talked about various aspects of what we wanted to talk about, Hillary [Clinton] and [Donald] Trump and down-ballot stuff, various issues. One of the things that it showed was you've got to use fear.
It looks like President Obama has a new campaign slogan: 'Yes I Did.'
I thought we would be concerned if he knew how to stay on message, if [Donald] Trump knew how to make the most of an argument against Secretary [Hillary] Clinton, by using some of the things that have been put on the news.
Mitt Romney said that he liked to fire people. Well, there's a pretty good message to send to Middle America. When Rick Perry heard that, he said, 'Well that's nothing. I like to execute people.'
For somebody who's never run for office before, Donald Trump understands that old axiom, "Define yourself before you're defined."
The problem is that we didn't fight the way we should've fought. We made it be about [Donald Trump] and [Hillary Clinton] as opposed to making it be about us. If we had said this was a fight, not about "I'm with Her" but "I'm with Us" then maybe we would've had a different attitude toward her.
Well, I mean, I think all campaigns run negative and positive ads.
