Party Defection Quotes

Suddenly to change one's opinions and go over to another party. The most notable flop on record was that of Saul of Tarsus, who has been severely criticised as a turn-coat by some of our partisan journals.

I grew up in a Texas where people would say, 'I didn't leave the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party left me.' Now, the reverse is happening. People are leaving the Republican Party because the Republican Party is going too far to the right in Texas. And that's a source of great potential support for Democrats.

Political renegades always start their career of treachery as 'the best men of all parties' and end up in the Tory knackery.

Remember, whenever a Republican leaves one side of the aisle and goes to the other, it raises the intelligence quotient of both parties.

Tony Blair faced a massive defection from his own party ranks during voting around the intervention in Iraq. For our present purpose, the point is not that he survived the defection, but that he had to face it.

I've spent my whole life fighting for leftwing causes, so I can tell you, no one is more surprised than me to be standing as candidate for Nigel Farage's Brexit party.

I am the last person whom it would be reasonable to expect to leave the Conservative Party.

In the relatively short time frame of December 2015 to March 2017, nearly half of all young Republicans left their party at some point, with roughly a quarter bidding the GOP adieu for good.

A majority of all defectors who voted Labour in 2010 but for a different party in 2015 said Ed Miliband had helped push them to another party. For those switching to the Tories, the second biggest reason was the fear that a Labour government would spend and borrow too much.

The election was held today. Besides the two great party tickets, there is a new party which has polled most unexpectedly five or six thousand votes. They call themselves the American party, and are opposed to the extension of suffrage to foreigners; ... with this powerful demonstration of popular opinion in their favor, I should not be surprised if ere long they should swallow up the Whig party. This new movement has occasioned a great defection from both parties.

Because Republicans defected and voted with all the Democrats to reject Jeff Sessions' nomination when they discovered that when he was working as a prosecutor in Alabama, he called the NAACP Un-American.

A decision as a backbencher to vote against one's party ought not to be taken lightly.