Constituency Building Quotes

But I have made no plans to run for any office right now.

The President has not created any Ford constituency, unique from that of any Republican President. The one exception to this is that he does show unique strength with young voters for a Republican.

We [members of Congress] tend to be gregarious or we tend not to get elected.

The career of a politician mainly consists in making one part of the nation do what it does not want to do, in order to please and satisfy the other part of the nation.

Art has political consequences, which is to say, it reorganizes society and creates constituencies of people around it.

There's a lot of work to be done if you're going to run for president or if you're going to run for re-election in a state as big as Florida.

Much of what candidates have to do is raise money and appeal to constituencies or interest groups that can provide that money.

If you are a Representative and want to be a Senator, you must be careful not to do anything which might upset the various forces you need to harness to get elected.

I am always suspicious of the formulation that "politics" has prevented a great idea from being enacted by government. Politics IS government, in a democratic society. It's a challenge for school reformers, like reformers in any realm, to build a popular constituency for their work. If the people it's supposed to benefit vote against it, that tells me that the person pushing reform lacks political skill. And political skill is a good thing.

To some extent, it is [that] everybody is resistant to change. Today, you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody that was opposed to the smoking ban … All of Western Europe followed New York City. Many of the states around here did. Every major city, including in the tobacco-growing states in the United States, did. Brazil is smoke-free. Mexico City is smoke-free. All of France, Italy, Spain, England—they’re all smoke-free. It takes a while. Leadership is about doing what you think is right and then building a constituency behind it. It is not doing a poll and following from the back. If you want to criticize the political process—and it’s probably true throughout history, and certainly not just in the United States—I think it’s fair to say, in business or in government, an awful lot of leaders follow the polls.

I think there's a number of pillars to success. One is you've got to have a great idea. The other is you've got to have a constituency, you've got to have finance, and you've got to be able to raise awareness.

The whole purpose of maintaining your power in government is to make sure that you stay in government. You stay in government by finding out who is liable to be against you. To do that, you try and put your finger into every single pie that is available to you.

The GOP needs to figure out a way to become more appealing to new constituencies.

I know something about how to build constituencies in an independent way.

One of the things you can learn from a figure like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez is that if you take all the resources of the state for yourself, you don't build much of a constituency and you have to rely on repression, and repression is difficult in the modern world.

My constituency is my top priority.