Larry Sabato Quotes (139 Quotes)

While Republicans may have lost the past two elections for governor, they can take comfort from the fact that they currently lead Virginia's love parade.

It's good news for Tester and it's good news for Burns.

It's an important event. It's one of those moments in his presidency that people want to remember well and he has to give them an opportunity to do so.

Only the activists, liberal and conservative, will remember this vote.

He's secretive by nature. It's a dumb thing for officials to do, especially someone as experienced as Cheney. Just imagine what Jon Stewart, Jay Leno and David Letterman are going to do to him for days. It's a self-inflicted wound.

He is obviously a single-issue candidate, and they do not do terribly well in the presidential process.

Expect this protracted race to get down and dirty, with both parties yet again spending freely in Southern Indiana media markets.

Since Vietnam, the Democratic Party has been viewed as the weaker on national security issues. Who better to make the case than veterans of the war It's hard to accuse them of a lack of patriotism.

He learned that you have to play ball. You have to serve the caucus and the leadership. And one of the primary ways to do that is to raise money for the caucus and help members who are politically in danger at the next election.

If the people of Louisiana are lucky, both the governor and the mayor will appoint personal representatives who will work with one another, ... In other words, they can get the bad blood out of the room by delegating it away.

Editorial endorsements are dinosaurs. The vast majority of the public don't read editorials.

It says the Republican leadership has accepted the political reality that Katherine Harris will be the GOP candidate for the United States Senate.

It won't do any harm because no one will remember by November, but it will raise money,... and that's the key.

Those are the conventions that matter, because they make it very difficult for that party's ticket. There is no surprise that Kerry did well, because nominees have a 99.9 percent chance of doing well at their convention.

I'll bet no one in New Jersey begrudges him that salary. Public officers ought to have set salaries that are sufficient for an average person to serve.

In another state, this could be devastating and could mean instant defeat. In New Jersey, it will take more than this.

Most of these people have done well because of their connection with DeLay, and DeLay has actively tried to place them in key positions knowing that it would help him and the Republicans in Congress, and it has.

I've had literally dozens of governors, senators and several presidents (talk to classes), and no one, other than the presidents, has gotten a better reception or more sustained ovation from these young people.

He's become more prominent because he's all but announced for president, ... That feeds into his legislative importance. He's a sleeper. ... Look at the list of who's running. None of them are purists except for Brownback.

People are trying to decide whether the man-made disaster is worse than Mother Nature's disaster.

This is red meat for Democratic activists. Many Democrats wonder if she can be elected in November 2008, so she has to keep the activist Democrats onboard. They're the ones who vote in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.

If you end up separating yourself from the president of your party, you are going to turn off a certain number of partisans.

That's all anyone was talking about this morning. It's the only thing people know about this, and it just made the nominee seem more human and sympathetic.

These areas tend to be home to high-income, highly educated voters who show up at the polls. These are areas that are changing the fastest, have people arriving in enormous numbers, have demands for better schools, better roads - and politicians have to b

There is nothing the Democratic leaders can do. It's the Democratic activists who are whining and complaining who could help themselves by shutting their mouths. They're distracting attention away from what the election will be and should be about - the president and Congress. They're just giving the press something to write about.

It's been a very successful term. It's hard to describe it any other way. He came in at a tough time. There was no money. The Republicans had just taken a landslide in the legislature. Things didn't look good. But he worked through the problems and ended up triumphant. It's a storybook ending. I didn't see that coming. Frequently these businessmen governors who've never been elected to anything before, flop. So he's the exception.

Off-year races are used for bragging rights by the party that gains a seat or two, but the truth is, they are only sometimes an indicator of the future.

Here's why this hurts It reminds people again that the intelligence was bad and we're in Iraq without end for some of the wrong reasons, and that's at the heart of his 36 percent.

Frist has managed to work himself into the worst of both worlds. He has alienated moderates because of his positions on Terri Schiavo. Then he has alienated conservatives on embryonic stem cell research.

You can be sure this will be cited in future years when other Cabinet nominees are not confirmed. Once you break the taboo, it's broken for all time.

They're trying to get the public's attention again and remind them of the arguments that once worked with the public.

It's a good thing for Richardson. What other presidential candidate in the Democratic Party would be called upon by an administration in a nonpartisan way to represent American interests in a dangerous place.

It's the first time we have seen it since Bush became president.

It demonstrated to the public for the first time that Bush no longer controls his own party in Congress. That's a mark of leadership that people do pay attention to.

It was really Katrina that triggered this because there was genuine outrage. It opened the floodgates. The media saw that the American public was finally willing to listen to criticism of the administration.

Members of Congress may not get in trouble with the law more than others, but when they do they come under a lot more scrutiny. They can get away with less, but they don't recognize that truth, ... The cumulative effect on the public is to increase cynicism about government and politicians.

This is both a substantive and a stylistic problem for Bush. Stylistically, he needs to convince people that he is in charge now and he gets it now .

This is what has caused Bush and many other politicians to shy away from any tough action on immigration. They fear the 'r' label the racist label. Almost by definition, it's tough to accuse Richardson of that. So that's why ... he's got an invulnerability shield that the other politicians would die for,

Hes facing a potentially divisive primary, and most of the criticism hes taking is from Democrats. Hes sided with Bush as much as he can. Iraq is enough. And hes got to go out of his way to show Democrats that hes a legitimate Democrat worthy of their support. Thats all this is, and it makes perfect sense.

It will be studied as one of the big ones -- an example of how a modest mishap goes completely out of control.

A majority of Americans living today, a surprisingly small majority because of the large youthful population, still remembers Watergate. And when we hear the word eavesdropping, those of us who lived during Watergate, we think of the nefarious activities of the Nixon administration.

This is a big election, about big things -- war and peace, the economy and all the rest. Real events over the next few months will have an impact.

I doubt that they will every be as unanimous as they once were.

Since 9-11, Bush's consistent political advantage has been the public's confidence in him to handle the terrorist threat. The Iraq war has weakened Bush's edge, and now the Dubai ports misstep may destroy it. This has become a troubled and tone-deaf Presidency.

It was callous trying to shift the blame to the victim. His entire PR staff should be fired just for that.

Republicans are in trouble, no mistake. But we are a long way as yet from conditions that would lead to a Democratic takeover of the House and Senate.

There's no way that someone who's never been in politics is going to defeat Robert Byrd after all this time and with all this seniority.

He was frustrated. I don't know whether he remembers or not, but he was very frustrated for a long while. He really wanted to be a success, and nothing was coming together for him. People thought, what in the world would his legacy be How can we sell a paragraph about this guy, much less a book

The Bush administration simply cannot let this happen. They have to stop this one way or the other. It would make a mockery of much of what President Bush has about our creation of a new democracy in Afghanistan.

Every time we have a new videotape of bin Laden, it reminds people of the administration's argument that (Iraq) is connected to the war on terror, whether it really is or isn't.