Remember, the first presidential candidate to reject public financing for both the primary and general election was... Barack Obama, in 2008. He did it, in spite of a flat pledge to the contrary, because his campaign saw that it could vastly outspend John McCain.
What happens traditionally in a campaign is they will go out to their list once or twice a week to raise money from their fund-raisers, but when a candidate gets to a general election, you get some donor fatigue because they've already maxed out their campaign to give.
In the 2010 general election, the Liberal Democrats built their campaign around a pledge to abolish tuition fees. By the end of that year, however, they had tripled them instead. The Liberal Democrats had made young people feel as if they were on their side. They were not.
And we know there has been horrendous loss of life and suffering and we know that there is anger. Anyone who came anywhere near the general election in constituencies with a substantial Muslim population knows that.
When you have a general election result you don't like, you don't have another general election.
History has shown that challenging an incumbent president in the primary almost inevitably leads to defeat in the general election.
The 2008 presidential election was a triumph of hope and unity over fear and divisiveness. Barack Obama's election reshapes America's political landscape and wipes away the false geography of 'red states' and 'blue states.'
Newt Gingrich had to work hard - getting Republican candidates to sign the Contract with America - to nationalize the election that swept Republicans to victory in 1994. A Democratic anti-Tea Party campaign would do that for the Republicans - nationalize the election, gratis - in 2010.
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.
If we would vote in mass on the more promising ticket, or, if the two are equally bad, would throw out the party that is in, and wait till the next election and then throw out the other party that is in - then, I say, the commercial politician would feel a demand for good government and he would supply it.
Election night is the easiest time to act like a grownup.
I found that there is very little interest in Washington for true election reform. That neither the White House nor either house of the Congress seems to be as committed to guaranteeing democratic participation in this country as we seem to be in other countries.
It's said that once you win an election, that you win political capital, and that's kind of my intent, is to spend political capital on the Gulf Coast, among other areas.
When I was in Grade 9, there was an election for high school president, and one of the candidates told us that if we elected him, he would abolish homework. He promised this to the entire student body from the stage in the school gymnasium.
If nothing else, the cyber attacks that occurred during the 2016 presidential election have laid bare the very real vulnerabilities that exist across our government and the private sector. Imagine the harm that could be done if our enemies ever hack into the Department of Defense or Homeland Security.
The 2016 election, I'm sure, wasn't the first one to be hacked; it was just the first one that was made public.
I was looking at a photograph of the 1997 election campaign yesterday, and I thought: 'My God. Did I really have that hairstyle? And that Tory blue suit?'
The Labour Party in 2011 was in an exceptionally bad place. We'd been hammered in an election. We didn't see the scale of it coming.
It's time we stopped ignoring the environment. Let's not let another election go by without making this a high priority.
I can't let important policy decisions hinge on the fact that an election is coming up every 90 days.
