G.T. Bynum Quotes

A very powerful mechanism to get elected is to play on anger and pick those wedge issues.

Trump's divisive rhetoric targets low-information voters and won't play well with the general public, either.

The big secret to winning elections is to get more votes than your opponent. My friend Representative Robin Hayes is a good example to study.

Neither political party is clean when it comes to tactics that divide our people.

Unquestionably, American political rhetoric can be repugnant, and the Right can certainly be as guilty as the Left.

It does no good to be a conservative if you can't sell a conservative message in a general election.

Republicans in the South could not win elections by talking about issues. You had to make the case that the other guy, the other candidate, was a bad guy.

Newt Gingrich developed a whole vocabulary of polarization in order to get Republican candidates elected.

The presidency made John Adams an old man long before there was television. As early as the nation's first contested presidential election, with Adams and Jefferson running to succeed Washington, you had a brutal, ugly, vicious campaign that was divisive and as partisan as anything we're experiencing today.

You don't win elections by telling people what you're against. We're very good at listing things we don't much like about what the Tories are doing. But you win elections by telling them what you're for, what you're going to change, what's going to be better.

Conventional wisdom holds that the public disproportionately blames Republicans for government shutdowns. The disproportionate election of Republicans to the U.S. Senate following the Republican-led shutdown of 2013 should have put that canard to rest.

You're never going to catch me agreeing with anything that Bruce Rauner says, given the things he's done in this state, trying to pit the city of Chicago against the rest of Illinois - I'll never agree with anything Bruce Rauner says.

What is polarizing in America is the Democrat Party agenda. What is polarizing and divisive is the Democrat Party agenda and the things they have been trying to do.

Donald Trump's campaign is as divisive as any we have seen in our lifetimes. It is built on stoking mistrust and pitting American against American. It's there in everything he says and everything he promises to do as president. This man is the nominee of the Party of Abraham Lincoln. We are watching it become the party of Trump. And that's not just a huge loss for our democracy. It is a threat to it, because Donald Trump's campaign adds up to an ugly, dangerous message to America.

Any politician who can be elected only by turning Americans against other Americans is too dangerous to be elected.

Donald Trump has never tried to reach out to all the American people, he never uses the language of unity, he doesn't try to charm or persuade. He just says, thanks to the people who voted for me and the rest of you are losers.

So much of democracy is built on antagonism. It institutionalizes a certain kind of antagonism. This is not to say that we shouldn't have any democracy, but the fact is that democracy has hardened political identities and made them more violent.

If you go against someone, you say, you can't vote for these Democrats, they don't have good values, they're not good people, they're weak, they're spineless, they're don't love America, they're giving aid and comfort to Saddam Hussein, that's the kind of thing I think is bad for America, because it stops the voters from thinking. And any time you stop thinking in a free society you get in trouble.

Spin is overrated. It is strategy, not spin, that wins elections.

This is what Newt Gingrich has wrought - is a politics in which it's very easy to destroy and very hard to build.

Our politics are being hijacked by a comparatively small number of people who seek to dominate the debate by screaming the loudest. They see the world as an urgent struggle between true believers and nonbelievers. They attempt to impose strict litmus tests and insist on conformity. They demonize dissent and consider all political opponents their enemies. Fear is their favourite tactic as they try to divide and conquer

I catch as much hell from the hard-core conservative people as I do the far left. The only difference is that the far right don't bring the hate to the table that the far left does. And that's my party. They just deal in so much hate. I mean the far left, not the Democrats, the far left really deal in hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.

It is ironic since whenever I have met with our elected officials they are invariably thoughtful, well-meaning people. And yet collectively 90% of their effort seems to be focused on how to stick it to the other party.

For decades the G.O.P. has won elections by appealing to social and racial divisions, only to turn after each victory to deregulation and tax cuts for the wealthy — a process that reached its epitome when George W. Bush won re-election by posing as America's defender against gay married terrorists, then announced that he had a mandate to privatize Social Security.

Politicians generally respond to who is going to help them get elected and re-elected.