David Axelrod Quotes

In 2016, Hillary Clinton had so much more money than the Trump campaign, yet, we see who won that election.

Spending for congressional campaigns is getting to be like the arms race.

I doubt if there will ever be another Republican president in my lifetime.

I think it is wrong to spend $4 or $5 million in a campaign.

I fully appreciate the fact that George W. Bush won 49% of my district.

What we Americans go through to pick a president is not only crazy and unnecessary but genuinely abusive. Hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in a craven, cynical effort to stir up hatred and anger on both sides.

Polls move money as much as money moves polls.

The only way a challenger can compete with the built-in advantages of incumbency is to spend money.

The only reason we won this election is that money does not vote. You do!

This Court now concludes that independent [political] expenditures, including those made by corporations, do not give rise to corruption or the appearance of corruption.

We have to talk about the way we finance campaigns.

Citizens United didn't work. Hey, Koch brothers, Karl Rove, Shellgame Adelson: Democracy trumps money sometimes.

The dominant advertising advantage of Clinton, with spending of 10 to 1 over Trump, reinforced the perception that she was trying to buy, rather than earn, votes.

Because Republicans have no ideas, they want to turn elections into the battle of dollars.

Pressure for the most part comes from this overarching concern that if I head into the election season without sufficient resources, then any outside group, any individual, any super PAC may choose to come in to my district and overwhelm it and take over the airwaves and control the debate.

The voters of Hawaii have said loud and clear that it's not money that wins elections.

[Donald Trump] doesn't have the money to run commercials and I launched into a tirade on money in politics.

The Sanders campaign, however, broke dramatically with over a century of U.S. political history. Extensive political science research, notably the work of Thomas Ferguson, has shown convincingly that elections are pretty much bought. For example, campaign spending alone is a remarkably good predictor of electoral success, and support of corporate power and private wealth is a virtual prerequisite even for participation in the political arena.

Donald Trump disproved the notion that there is a direct dollar-for-dollar correlation between how much money you had in your traditional war chest and what your election outcome was going to be.

We agree that Citizens United is a very bad decision. We don't believe outspending your opponent is the way to go, since we don't believe we will ever be outspending our opponents!

Trump can spend virtually an unlimited amount of his own money on this election, which makes him unlike any of the other candidates in the race. So those who oppose him will have to work very hard to make sure he doesn't win.

I mean this is a revolution in how campaigns work - more money was spent by super PACs than by either myself or John Faso. So what that means is that if you're a voter in this district you are more likely to have heard from a super PAC than from me or my opponent.

Citizens United provided unprecedented political weaponry to big special interests. My personal view was it was calculated to do that.

Nobody ever wins the first time they run for office. Nobody's ever supposed to win their first bid for office. Nobody's ever supposed to win without taking lobbyists' money. No one's ever supposed to defeat an incumbent. No one's ever supposed to run a grassroots campaign without running any ads on television. We did all of those things.

In the 2016 U.S. Senate race, I was on the receiving end of more than $3 million in outside negative attacks funded by the NRA, the second-most spent on any Senate campaign in the country.