Political Realignment Quotes

I didn’t leave the Democratic Party. The party left me.

Because, Bill, I think we’ve given the South away to the Republican party for as long as anyone can foresee.

We just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come.

The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans.

I was a Democrat for a period of time early on. And then I was also an independent. And then I became a Republican.

I didn't desert the Democratic party; the Democratic party deserted me.

A conservative is a liberal who got mugged the night before.

If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic.

Politically speaking, Miami-Dade was once a Republican stronghold, thanks in large part to older Cuban voters who became more politically influential following the Bay of Pigs invasion. In contrast, Democrats used to rely on votes in North Florida and the Space Coast in an era of much softer partisanship.

I grew up as a Democrat in a very strong Democratic family, but I will tell you that the Democratic Party that exists in this country is not the Democratic Party I grew up around.

The two real political parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people don’t acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats, instead.

The 1994 elections that brought Newt Gingrich to power in the House decisively shaped the remaining years of Bill Clinton's presidency, pushing him further to the right and bringing out his latent tendency to govern every day as if an election were being held the next.

Individuals move and shift from one party to another simply on their aspirations for office.

Obama seemed poised to realign American politics after his stunning 2008 victory. But the economy remains worse than even the administration's worst-case scenarios, and the long legislative battles over health care reform, financial services reform and the national debt and deficit have taken their toll. Obama no longer looks invincible.

Trump is a populist in the same mold as the nineteenth-century Populists who gave their name to American grassroots political movements. Historians and pundits argued themselves blue in the face over whether Populists were reactionary or progressive, but they were both.

Usually, I chalk Democratic dreams of a blue Texas to the same sort of thinking that brought us the inevitability of the coalition of the ascendant and 100% certainty that Donald Trump was going to lose.

Imagine Texas as a blue state: how hard it would be to carry the presidency or gain control of the Senate.

When a third party's demands become popular enough, they are appropriated by one or both of the major parties and the third party disappears. Third parties are like bees: Once they have stung, they die.

Donald Trump is a symptom, not a disease. The disease is the death of real political conservatism: a cool, intelligent reluctance to believe that all change is good, a love for the established, the particular, and the well-worn.

A Trump presidency - neutral between dictatorships and democracies, opposed to free trade, skeptical of traditional U.S. defense alliances, hostile to immigration - would mark the collapse of the entire architecture of the U.S.-led post-World War II global order.

In politics the future is never a straight line projection of the present.

In those days the Communists talked like Democrats … We got along well enough until the Nazi-Stalin Pact …. Then my leftist associates started laying off Hitler and started ranting about the “imperialist war.”

The Republican Party supported the Equal Rights Amendment before the Democratic Party did. But what happened was that a lot of very right-wing Democrats, after the civil rights bill of 1964, left the Democratic Party and gradually have taken over the Republican Party.

Four years is a long time in politics.

Pakistan was once called the most allied ally of the United States. We are now the most nonallied.