Moderate Republicans Quotes

There are few things more amusing in the world of politics than watching moderate Republicans charging to the right in pursuit of greater glory.

I don't fit into the traditional Republican box that the wingnuts who have hijacked my party think all Republicans should.

The Republican Party is a much bigger tent than people give it credit for. We have a lot of what I guess you all call moderate Republicans.

Liberalism is dead, so dead that Democrats have all become moderate Republicans, and the heavy hand of Big Government is now limp and damp and trembly.

Some of you may remember people like Dwight D. Eisenhower. And in my. State we had a whole list of moderate Republicans who actually were concerned about the environment, education, women’s rights. They didn’t have our politics, but they had a deep concern about the welfare of ordinary people.

I think the Republican party should be a broad party.

Activism spawned by Sanders campaign is beginning to make inroads into electoral politics. Under Barack Obama, the Democratic Party pretty much collapsed at the crucial local and state levels, but it can be rebuilt and turned into a progressive force. That would mean reviving the New Deal legacy and moving well beyond, instead of abandoning, the working class and turning into Clintonite New Democrats, which more or less resemble what used to be called moderate Republicans, a category that has largely disappeared with the shift of both parties to the right during the neoliberal period.

Once the religious right got their beachhead in the Republican Party in 1980, they expanded it. Even Barry Goldwater was extremely hostile to the religious right, but Reagan catered to them. The religious right then expanded their base and that drove the moderates out.

A liberal Republican is a contradiction in terms ... a moderate Republican is a liberal who doesn't like to call himself a liberal.

Right after liberal Democrats, the most dangerous politicians are country club Republicans.

When I arrived in the Senate, the moderate so-called Rockefeller Republicans held the balance of power.

The Republicans were not always insane. They might've had politics I didn't agree with, but they weren't always actually certifiable.

This is the classic fight between the moderate Republicans who try to get to the middle by compromise and the conservative Republicans who try to create a new middle by driving the left away.

My father, Birch Bayh, represented Indiana in the Senate from 1963 to 1981. A progressive, he nonetheless enjoyed many friendships with moderate Republicans and Southern Democrats.

We don't have a lot of Reagan-type leaders in our party. Remember Ronald Reagan Democrats? I want a Republican that can attract Democrats.

There were more moderate Republicans in those days than there are today.

As the Republicans run to the crazy Tea Party right, they leave behind the huge mass of genuinely moderate and independent Americans that make up the majority of voters. The ones that used to consider themselves now-extinct moderate Republicans. They're up for grabs. And the Democrats have to grab them!

In 2012 Roger Ailes, you know, desperately tried to get who into the race? Chris Christie, a somewhat moderate if tough talking from a purple state. They were very interested this David Petraeus, a figure who served in the Obama administration as CIA chief.

I think that the Republicans who have been cautious, recognizing that they have to be concerned about their re-elections, etc., they won't be able to stand with Donald Trump when we unfold his connection to the Kremlin and what they were involved in, which I consider to be collusion. I don't think that any Republican, even moderates or conservatives, who love America and who consider themselves patriots, they cannot stand with this president when it appears he has participated in undermining this democracy. They're going to have to fall. That's what I believe.

Moderate Republicans are reverse Houdinis. They tie themselves up in knots and then tell you they can’t do anything because they’re tied up in knots.

A Republican Party without moderates was like a heavily muscled body without a head.

Romney, like Sen. John McCain and Bob Dole before him, were meant to mollify moderates, attract Independents, and 'rebrand' the party in a way that mostly fits the ideal of media types who would never vote Republican anyhow. Each of them lost.