Rick Scott Quotes

Electoral contests have nothing but polls, which is why people have grown so obsessed with them; we're desperate for an objective rendering of what is happening and what may happen.

We liked to think that polling and political analysis had become scientific, but this campaign changes all that.

Let me tell you the polls that count, and those are the polls a couple of weeks before the election. That's when the pollsters worry about holding onto their credibility. Those are the polls that everybody remembers.

I'm a believer in the polls, by the way. Rarely do you see a poll that's very far off.

You'd think experienced political professionals would know better than to place their trust in exit polls, notoriously inaccurate surveys that had John Kerry winning the 2004 election by five points when he actually lost by three.

Frankly, I thought we would have lost the House by now.

I'd rather be underestimated by the polltakers than by the voters.

Early polls mean nothing.

I desire the undisguised opinion of some experienced and sagacious Pennsylvania politician, as to how the vote of that state, for governor, and president, is likely to go. In casting about for such a man, I have settled upon you; and I shall be much obliged if you will write me at Springfield, Illinois.

Political analysts tend to overinterpret the results of isolated elections.

I think there are a lot of factors going into an election. I think the bottom line is - is that Donald Trump is gonna be sworn in as the 45th President of the United States of America. And it's not necessarily profitable to sort of try to untangle all the different factors that went into it.

I'm not a political pundit, and I don't follow these things probably as closely as others, but there are polls that have shown that Senator Bernie Sanders can beat Donald Trump and, I believe, some of the other Republican candidates as well.

This is partly a function of approval ratings. People pay attention [to polls] and start saying, 'Lets take a more independent tack.' It is frankly self-interest, self-preservation.

If the critics are right that I've made all my decisions based on polls, then I must not be very good at reading them.

If I worried about pollsters, I wouldn't be president.

The last thing you want to do is read the latest poll and then make policy.

Republican pundits always believe Republicans are going to win; Democratic pundits always believe Democrats are going to win.

A good deal of our politics is psychological.

Three weeks is a lifetime in presidential politics. The conventional wisdom changes so suddenly.

I've learned a long time ago not to take polls too seriously.

Vote counting is 90 percent art, 10 percent science, and all about human nature

As problems have grown more complex, leaders have struggled to find the language to discuss them clearly, credibly and at the right emotional amplitude. Nonplussed and tongue-tied, politicians give themselves over to message gurus … who peddle the notion that poll-tested words — honed and targeted with scientific precision — can pick the lock of public opinion.

Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties

Michigan is a state we should have won in 2016, and we didn't, and I want to understand why.

Polls can change; people's opinions can change. Voting intentions can change, and I think it would be a silly leader, a silly political party, that would assume that we have it sewn up.