Political Funding Quotes

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.

Spending limits have proven a monumental failure at limiting campaign spending in presidential elections, merely diverting the money underground.

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.

Because Republicans have no ideas, they want to turn elections into the battle of dollars.

Women tend to give political candidates only about 10 percent of what males give, and males give women candidates only 10 percent of what they give to males.

Politicians often say to me, 'Articles in the 'Observer' don't get me votes, but you get me money.'

What I write about is how much influence it's had in things like state legislatures and governorships and congressional races. The other thing that's even more important in the long run is that very extreme money has affected the ecosystem of ideology in the country.

Grass-roots politics, linking small-dollar fundraising to massive local volunteer organization, showed that it can rival the power of a right-wing machine comprising super PACs backed by entrenched interests and mega-donors.

The Koch brothers, through the expenditure of billions of dollars and the creation and support of dozens of extreme right organizations, have taken fringe extremist ideas and made them mainstream within the Republican Party.

Money is the mother's milk of everything, and it certainly is the mother's milk of politics.

The United Mine Workers and the CIO have paid cash on the barrel for every piece of legislation that we have gotten…

There might be a lot of difference between Republicans and Democrats on key social issues like women's rights and health care. But when it comes to taking corporate cash, they're pretty much the same beast.

The NRA is funded by weapons manufacturers, and those same manufacturers know that they stand to lose some business if we pass common-sense gun legislation. As a result, the NRA contributes money to politicians to ensure that gun control never happens.

You cannot be a party which takes money from Wall Street, which is not strong on the pharmaceutical industry, which is ripping us off every day, which is not strong on health care in taking on the insurance companies, which has not shown a desire to stand up and fight the economic establishment, and then tell working families that you are on their side. People see through that.

Political activities in Russia should be as transparent as possible. Financing political activities from abroad is something the state should keep an eye on.

I went through six years of battles on health care because I didn't have $100 million worth of advertising saying how it would never work.

You don’t get campaign contributions just because it’s a philanthropic endeavor.

We [conservatives] are at a disadvantage in the political discussion in America. Most of the participants are of the left. The media, academia and Hollywood … are of the left. We need soft money to offset that disadvantage.

Barack Obama was elected President in 2008 and re-elected in 2012. The natural thing would be to suggest money on the right [wing] doesn't really matter that much. The first thing you have to know is that the presidential elections are the ones where it's most difficult for money to hold sway, in that they're the most public elections.

The cost of fielding a candidate has become so astronomical that the concept of a people’s candidate is just an abstraction.

I think the scary thing is that there is in place already a sprawling infrastructure of advocacy groups, think tanks, academics and candidates and politicians funded by the Kochs and other deep-pocketed groups on the far right ready to attack Hillary Clinton.

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.

The realistic way to reduce the amount of money in politics is to reduce the amount of politics in money -- the importance of government in allocating wealth and opportunity.

Planned Parenthood and Human Rights Campaign they're not really the establishment. I can't obviously speak for Senator Bernie Sanders or about Planned Parenthood. But what we do see, and we've seen for years in America, is that the establishment, that is, the big banks and the executives and the wealthy do support a lot of non-profits and make the non-profits basically walk to the tune of the establishment.

I'm interested in full disclosure for people who give money to politicians. But I'm not a politician. I'm an advocate.