Congressional Elections Quotes

The difference between being a member of the House and being a member of the Senate is the difference between chicken salad and chicken shit.

We have lost the elections; and it is natural that each of us will believe, and say, it has been because his peculiar views was not made sufficiently prominent.

In running for Congress, you have to raise over $2 million. You are going to end up shaking hands with people with whom you would rather not shake hands. 95 percent of all the candidates with the most money, win.

I want to step up our voter-registration activities. Not every branch does it, and not all the time. I want them to go back and get out the vote because I want us to have a big impact on the Congressional elections this year.

That makes a difference when you have all these Asian faces running then getting elected. You have some 30 people, many of them Democrats, running for Congress. When the community sees the other faces who look like them can run and win, I think it encourages them.

[The Democrats] can't stop anything. It's why everybody's so confused why they reelected [Nancy] Pelosi.

No one was elected to Congress because he or she promised to cut Social Security, Medicare or Medicaid.

Republicans and blacks had an unlikely alliance around 'max black' after the 1990 census. By concentrating black voters in some districts, the strategy elected a record number of black congressmen in 1992. But the remaining 'bleached' districts were more likely to elect white Republicans.

In the very next election, the American people elected 63 new Republicans to the House of Representatives - the largest sweep of Congress for any party since 1948. Even liberal Massachusetts elected a Republican senator solely because of his vow to vote against Obamacare.

The marked decrease in the average vote for congressmen in the South, from 1892 to 1902, is due primarily to the limitations upon the suffrage, and that these limitations were intended to eliminate the negro vote.

Ten of those Republican incumbents, all of whom voted for the impeachment of President Clinton, are from states that Bill Clinton carried.

I simply want to do what I can to have the best Congress possible representing the American people.

In my opinion, we need to again consider the possibility of public funding of congressional elections, following the very successful experience with clean money systems in Maine and Arizona.

I think we ought to suspend, perhaps, elections for Congress for two years and just tell them we won't hold it against them, whatever decisions they make, to just let them help this country recover. I really hope that someone can agree with me on that.

I don't know how you change that. There's hardly anybody left like me in the Democratic Party in Congress. These districts have been so gerrymandered that, in most of them, a Democrat can't win. Somebody like me trying to start off today, he'd never get endorsed. Because I'm too conservative.

I also believe that if we're serious about change, we need to have a real discussion about public financing for congressional elections.

We all live in the moment, and we often mistakenly believe that what is true today was true always. Not so in politics, and especially in Congressional elections.

Obama lost his ability to push his agenda through Congress when he received what he himself called a 'shellacking' in the November 2010 elections. That shellacking was primarily the result of massive policy overreach when he had a Democratic Congress in his pocket.

Congress is a culture and I would love to be part of it.

Voting in presidential and congressional elections is a national right - and the national government should protect it.

Campaign boot camp started as an opportunity to work in a grassroots way with people who were running for Congress. Colleagues on the Democratic National Committee were batting around different possibilities. I said, 'We should have boot camps.'

If you're in a safe Republican district, say Congressman [ Gus] Bilirakis,you probably don't have much to worry about which is why you can get away with talking about death panels.

The right to participate in the choice of representatives for Congress includes, as we have said, the right to cast a ballot and to have it counted at the general election whether for the successful candidate or not.

To those who say it would be too difficult to repeal and replace Obamacare, I say it's a two step process. We repeal the Pelosi Congress in 2010 and replace the Obama Administration in 2012.

With the exception of members of Congress and their families, and instructors in civics and constitutional lawyers, I do not believe there are two percent of the American people who know that a member of Congress is elected one year and does not take his office until 13 months afterwards.