The donor party is the 2 million people who contribute more than $5000 to political candidates. Unless you are elected by the donor party, you cannot run for major office.
The Washington Post said that 50% of the contributors of the Republican Party were Jewish and 70% of the Democratic Party. That's 2% and they control America.
You can't take money from the taxpayers out of the treasury to give it to pay off your political donors. That's corruption to do that.
George Bush calls his biggest fundraisers Rangers and Pioneers. But today, we stand together, and we call ourselves, simply, Americans.
Many of these [big political] donors are my friends. Those people are not like charities ... They Want. These are total tough cookies. When they give millions and millions of dollars, they're not doing it for the good of the American Cancer Society. They're doing it for themselves.
Why, over her political career has Wall Street been a major - the major campaign contributor to Hillary Clinton? You know, maybe they're dumb and they don't know what they're going to get, but I don't think so.
It is one thing to talk about fundraising and another to do it as a candidate, and I have learned so much about how much money it costs to run a campaign and what it means to raise money.
Trump is not a fan of fundraising, but he's willing to do it.
There's a difference between those two [George Soroses and the Tom Steyers] and the Kochs that I think is important.
Some of the donors are - many of them are good people and they're donating because their ideas are those embodied by the candidate and that's really what they're doing, they're promoting the ideas. But many of them are desirous of things in addition to that. So when I see [Donald] Trump not respond 'cause he can't spend the money, I'm secretly hoping it isn't gonna hurt him.
One of the problems with a candidate like Bob Kennedy, and his brother before him, was that people assumed they didn't need contributions.
Money has made it more difficult for Democrats to define an economic agenda that is different than the Republican agenda; we are taking from the same contributors.
Barack Obama's large contributor was Goldman Sachs - same thing on the Republican side. If you go to both their conventions, you see the same lobbyists paying off both sides so they win either way.
That's why they're in the problem - having the problem they're having. They're not conservative. They're being run by their donors.
I'm asking regular folks to be my super PAC.
Redistricting makes the inequities in campaign financing even worse. Most elections are so noncompetitive due to how the lines are drawn that big donors already know who's going to win. So they give to the likely winners to curry favor.
There's no way now for you to get a Democratic or Republican nomination without being able to raise $200 or $300 million or more. I would not be inclined to do that, and I would not be capable of doing it.
There's all kinds of conservative donors. The Koch brothers are big donors. There's all kinds of them. But none of them have actively organized hate groups that run around and protest and try to upset people and get in as close as they can to their lives and the way they live them and make a nuisance of themselves. That's not how the right has always sought to win elections.
I've never been able to understand why a Republican contributor is a 'fat cat' and a Democratic contributor of the same amount of money is a 'public-spirited philanthropist'.
There isn’t a person at the Koch brothers events who would not get a good return on their investment by investing in [Santorum] as president, because of what they believe about the free enterprise system.
I'm very proud to know the Koch brothers. This may be a breaking news announcement for the media: I am the Koch brothers' brother from another mother.
The Obama administration is fighting to block access to names of visitors to the White House, taking up the Bush administration argument that a president doesn't have to reveal who comes calling to influence policy decisions.
Republicans are being loyal to their donors. They're being loyal to the paymasters, if you will. And it's squandering an opportunity.
Some of my best friends are Jewish contributors to the Democratic Party.
What I saw during the Hillary Clinton campaign [2016] with data dummies who were more concerned with polls than people, they were more concerned with donors than voters. And it wasn't a lot of heart felt on that campaign and I think it left us vulnerable.
