Partisan Shift Quotes

The whole new Democratic Party is the old Republican Party. We have a whole bunch of elephants running around in donkey's clothes.

The pro-life, pro-family Republicans are now pro-neonatal detention and deportation. It isn't enough to drive out the people not born here; now they want to drive out the ones that were.

I'm very proud that I was a Goldwater Girl. And then my political beliefs changed over time.

It appears that President Obama is making great progress on climate change, he is changing the political climate in the country back to Republican.

Can old dogs learn new tricks? …. Issue positions among partisans tend to be relatively stable… Party position changes tend to come not from learning new tricks but from electing new dogs.

Over the last 30 odd years, Democrats have moved to the right and the right has moved into the mental hospital. So what we have is one perfectly good party for hedge fund managers, credit card companies, banks, defense contractors, big agriculture and the pharmaceutical lobby... That's the Democrats. And they sit across the aisle from a small group of religious lunatics, flat-earthers and civil war re-enactors who mostly communicate by AM radio and call themselves the Republicans and who actually worry that Obama is a socialist. Socialist? He's not even a liberal.

Apparently the Republican base got radicalized first, and Democrats picked up the ball later. Or something.

What we ended up with, from Bill Clinton onward, is a status quo party and an 'undo the system' party, where the Democrats became the status quo party and the Republicans became the 'undo the system' party.

For years, we just accepted the premise that the reporters from that J-school mentality of neutrality and objectivity were just laying out the facts. We just assumed that Walter Cronkite was unbiased. In hindsight, it is clear that Walter Cronkite was biased, and that he used feigned objectivity as the cudgel to change the American narrative from being a right of center one to being a left of center one.

In fact, you see Hillary [Clinton] moving very far to the left. You see all the Republicans moving very far to the right.