Matthew Dowd Quotes (27 Quotes)

November will be a very, very close race. But the poll is good news for us and not good news for the Democrats.

The Kerry campaign is working on their 16th negative ad.

The benefit the Republicans have is geography and redistricting. There is a very small window for Democrats to take advantage of.

This is part of our efforts to highlight what has happened over the last two years. This is sort of the start of that dialogue.

It's the first time all the candidates will be judged in comparison to others, so they need to be cognizant of people beginning to see this as a choice.

Michigan is one of the opportunities -- and there's not a lot of them when overall the numbers don't look good.

Former President Bush's approval on the economy at this same time in 1991 was 28 percent and fell to the mid-teens in 1992.

Voters have a tendency to reward leadership. This means a large body of people are open to hearing what the governor has to say about the next four years.

There's a reason why the American public in poll after poll trusts this president more in fighting the war on terrorism than they do John Kerry. That's been true day after day after day in this campaign.

After the Democratic nominee is all but certain in the late winterearly spring, it would not be surprising for us to fall behind for a bit,

All of that makes it harder on the Democrats. That's a benefit we have that we never had before.

Republicans inadvertently tipped their hand on this point yesterday. During a conference call, Bush pollster-strategist Matthew Dowd said they're also airing a 60-second radio ad that resembles the anti-Kerry spot. But ... it actually has a positive element to it as well.

Obviously, a lot of things that the administration had wanted to accomplish in 2005 and going into 2006 were tough.

Bush-Cheney raised expectations for Edwards, saying the main reason Kerry chose him as his running mate was because of his oratorical skills. Calling Edwards a professional debater, ... was picked because he was a successful personal injury lawyer that's had an unbelievably good record of winning personal injury awards. This is not a person that was a senator that was good at debates this was a person who was basically paid to debate in front of juries.

Once the Democratic nominee is all but assured, that person will receive a deluge of positive press at least for a couple of weeks, and this will be temporarily reflected in public opinion polls.

Republicans only have to win home games. Democrats have to win all their home games and away games too. That's the difficulty.

Democrats have a problem if they go one way and don't emphasize the rule of law and only have compassion. The Republicans have a problem if they only go with the rule of law. There has to be a balance.

When an issue dominates the landscape like this one will dominate the landscape, I think through this election and probably for a long time to come, it puts Republicans on a very good footing.

We took one message and designed lots of different avenues to communicate it. They took a lot of different messages and drove them all into one big funnel.

The first vote is always the hardest.

This campaign will be ... a choice between the vision Arnold has for California in the next four years contrasted with where the Democratic nominee wants to take the state.

As the inevitable discussion proceeds in the months ahead, this memo should provide both perspective and a reality check. President Bush's approval numbers will again fall back to more realistic levels fairly quickly. All were quite successful on Election Day.

bad news for the Bush team and declared 'the sky is falling' once again.

Every incumbent president in the last 25 years has been behind the opposition in the latter part of his first term -- the sky is not falling.

We think it's important to remember what happened on 911 as we devise policies to address what happened, ... is a good ad, laying out the challenges this country's been through. We've had tremendously positive feedback. We're happy with the debate that the ad started, and we want to continue that. That's sort of how we see that.

Austin aides have their focus groups too, and they claim the vice president's aggressiveness only rankles, reminding voters of the ugly noises from the past four or five years in Washington, the showdowns and shutdowns. The less partisan voters, says the campaign, like Bush's happy soundings of cooperation. Among swing voters, they don't care about the party labels, ... They want things solved.

President Bush maintains an approval on the economy in the mid-forties -- exactly what Clinton had at the end of 1995 and above what Reagan had in 1983.