Electoral Margin Quotes

In my primary, I only won by 23 votes in that one, so every vote really does count, and I want to make sure I get as many as I possibly can.

When I was first elected I got 50% of the vote in '77 in the general election. In '81 I got 75%. In '85, I got 78%. No mayor has ever gotten that high a vote. So it was not an issue. Except for people who were very hostile to me. They thought they would injure me.

We had the election won. Debates couldn't help us and might hurt.

Donald Trump will become president even after losing the popular vote in our November elections by a wide margin. To govern effectively, he must appeal to a broader base than what he campaigned on and avoid the divisive rhetoric that alienated so many Americans.

One strange quality of writing about political campaigns is that it's a little like writing about a baseball game inning by inning. We presume we can say something about the final result from the state of play a third of the way through. You can when a game is a colossal blowout, but you can't when it's close.

This election could come down to just a handful of votes. It could come down to just one vote.

Election victories increasingly depend on factors other than who votes, or tries to vote, and for whom. In 2000, the presidency was awarded by the Supreme Court, pre-empting the count of thousands of Florida votes.

The actual gap between Labor, Likud and the new central party is microscopic.

I would say the reason that Tim Bishop electorally was able to get more votes, if you were just going to analyze registration and numbers, is that he had a quarter of the Republican vote, every election. No one is getting a quarter of the Republican vote from me.

Election losses are always an inkblot test for partisans. If a candidate's defeat has no clear and obvious cause, if the data points are all over the map, it is easy for those on the sidelines to claim, 'Candidate X would have won if only he or she had been more like... me.'

In 1998 Harry Reid and I had a very close race. It was less than a tenth of a percentage point. We had a reasonable recount. There were a lot of things that I could have pursued at the time, but I just felt that at the time that I should have, you know, conceded the race.

And looking at the landslides, you saw how Gore beat Bush so substantially in California.

The president is under 50 percent approval ratings in all the battleground states. So, you could say that President Obama is defying gravity by still being in a dead heat with Mitt Romney. And one of the reasons that he is, is because the changing face of the electorate are giving him a small boost.

If it is widely assumed that the new President cannot move forward simply because of a narrow victory, there can easily develop a sense of unease and uncertainty, adversely affecting every sector of American society, our economy and the perception of other nations.

I was the guy that told Bill Clinton he was going to win. I had gotten the final polling numbers. He had a comfortable lead. He was not going to lose.

I was the Republican governor of the heavily Democratic state of New Mexico. I focused on good government, and I got it done - just like my running mate, former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld. The people of New Mexico reelected me by a comfortable margin. Ditto for Weld.

A big win for [Hillary] Clinton would allow her to claim that the country rejected Trumpism, while a narrow win leaves her limping into office with the highest unfavorable ratings for any new president.

If you look back through history in the United States, there have been very few landslide elections. Half the country always voted for someone else.

Illinois has less than a 12 percent black population and I won with 55 percent of the vote.

Nobody builds a permanent majority in politics, if they did It wouldn’t be politics.

The average GOP presidential vote in these last five elections was 44.5 percent. In the last three, it was 48.1 percent. Give Romney an extra point for voter disillusionment with Obama, and a half-point for being better financed than his predecessors. It still strikes me as a path to narrow defeat.

Gerald Ford is the first President of the United States to be elected by a majority of one—and nobody demanded a recount.

Minority candidates continue to overwhelmingly support Democratic candidates. As long as that is the case, the Republican National Committee, and other Republican groups, may be tempted to keep minority voters from casting their ballots, especially in light of the razor thin margins of victory by which many elections have been decided in recent years.

Nixon in 1968, unlike Obama 2008, was elected as a minority president with only 43 percent of the vote. Yet, in 1972, he won what, in some measures, was the most lopsided election in American history with 61 percent.

Centrist voters typically decide general elections, so hard-left or hard-right platforms don't help.