Quotes about Election Loss

Lyndon B. Johnson

This is probably the greatest thing that I have ever accomplished but I fear that we Democrats have lost the South for the rest of my lifetime and probably you lifetime as well.

Prior to Johnson’s civil rights efforts, the South virtually always voted for Democrats in all elections. The only political competition was for the Democratic Party Primaries. The term “Solid South” meant that it was solid for the Democratic Party. But after the Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, the racist whites who used to be Democrats switched and joined the genuine traditional conservative and created a Republican Southern majority that was as solid for the GOP as the Democrats had ever enjoyed.

E. W. Howe

The people are always worsted in an election.

Abraham Lincoln

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.

Some things do not change in democratic politics.

Margaret Thatcher

We have made too much of one or two people, and we think that they can win or lose elections for us. Don't be depressed if one particular person transgresses. It doesn't lose an election unless the Party loses faith in itself.

George W. Bush

Let's face it. If I was funnier than Ronald Reagan, I would have won in 1980. And he'd be up here tonight trying to laugh away the Bush deficit.

Rush Limbaugh

Democrats losing elections. Donald Trump did win this. It's not illegitimate. And when the day comes that they realize and sober up that he's not going to be hounded out of office, that he's not gonna wake up one day and say to Mike Pence, "Here. Take the keys. I've had it." Then what are they gonna do? Because they're shooting every barrel they've got now. And they will probably continue. The think least we can make people hate him.

Rush Limbaugh

If [the Conservatives] lose, we say, "Okay, we gotta change. We gotta improve, come back and win the next election." They [leftists] don't. When they lose and even when they win, because they know that they're in a numerical minority. But that numerical minority is a vast majority of pop culture and education environments. And so they just bully their way.

Joe Lieberman

I didn’t get enough votes.

The first Jew to run for the Vice Presidency on a major party ticket.

Gerald R. Ford

Honey, there go 20 million votes, but we’ll get over it.

Rush Limbaugh

The liberals are this way. When they lose elections, they don't look inward and ask what they did wrong. They look at you and ask, "Why are you so stupid? How in the world could you have not voted for us?".

Tom Perez

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

David Letterman

Howard Dean was endorsed by former Vice President Al Gore and now he is getting advice from Al Gore. And I'm thinking, who better to give advice than the guy who couldn't even get elected with the most votes?

Timothy Noah

When Democrats lose, they're pathetic. When Republicans lose, they're bitter and mean.

Keith Ellison

If you put everything, your heart and soul into a campaign, it might take you a while to come around to the realization that, you know, another person has won.

Bruce Rauner

There are plenty of examples of very wealthy people who have run for office and failed, certainly in Illinois.

Bill Clinton

There's no negative to this except I might lose the [Democratic presidential] nomination to Bob Kerry .... Because he's single, nobody cares who he's screwing.

press speculation about the governor's possible extramarital affair with Flowers

Willie Brown

Nobody with the name of Barack Obama will win anything.

He saw Obama’s name as a fatal problem with the American Electorate which turned out to be more tolerant than Brown gave them credit for.

Reshma Saujani

In 2010, I ran for Congress in a Democratic primary against someone who had been there for 18 years. 'The Daily News' endorsed me. I was in 'The New York Times' above the fold. CNBC called this one of the hottest races in the country. On election day, votes for me never went past 19%. I lost.

Kellyanne Conway

The whole celebrity thing didn't work for Hillary Clinton. She tried that in her campaign and it failed.

Chuck Todd

President-elect Donald Trump is not happy that he lost the popular vote. And this stat is probably not going to make him feel any better.

Katie Pavlich

Democrats didn't just lose the 2016 presidential election, they lost seats across the country at every level of government under Obama's tenure in the White House.

Gerald Bernard Kaufman

This election manifesto is the longest suicide note in history.

Kaufman was right. The party lurch far to the left caused them to lose the election.

Rush Limbaugh

The Democrats are losing power in every election. And I think that's part of the panic. They want us to believe that the behavior and panic is rooted in an absolute outraged offense over this president that we have, this is just unacceptable and some maniac like Trump is so out of the ordinary, out of the norm, has to be stopped. I don't think that's what it is. I mean, it's part of it. But I think there's a much larger panic that is taking over the Democrat Party. And it's gonna implode on 'em.

Alan K. Simpson

Republicans have the habit of giving their possible presidential candidates a saliva test for purity, and then bitching for 4 years because they lost the last election..

Republican candidates at that time, in order to win the nomination of the party, had to prove to the base of primary voters that they were strong conservatives. In doing so, they had to adopt policies and views that were too far to the right for most American voters and they would lose the general election.

Steven J. Brams

A simple election reform to encourage moderates to run, and win, would be approval voting, in which voters can “approve of”—and thereby vote for—as many candidates as they like. The candidate with the most “approvals”—votes—wins the election. Because approval voting does not restrict voters to supporting only one candidate, it tends to result in the election of a centrist, not the strongest minority candidate who benefits from a divided field. Approval voting is widely used by major engineering and scientific societies to elect their officers. At NYU, the politics and economics departments use it to elect a chair. To implement approval voting in public elections, the parties could choose to use it in their primaries, or state legislatures could mandate its use. Bills to do this have been introduced in several states, including New Hampshire.

Election Loss Quotes