Mara Liasson Quotes

Republicans think that [Ted] Cruz would be like Barry Goldwater. He'd lose in a landslide and pull the party down with him. They'd lose Senate and House seats.

If they can get 15 or higher, it will be a very bad night for House Speaker Paul Ryan. Ryan twisted himself into a pretzel by endorsing but not always supporting Donald Trump. Now, he's facing the prospect of a slimmer majority, with fewer moderates. Conservative members in the Freedom Caucus have already sent warning shots threatening Ryan's tenure as speaker.

As one person said to me , Republicans know [Donald] Trump is a stain on their party.

For a long time, many Republicans thought if they just took two aspirin and laid down, [Donald] Trump would go away.

As one conservative intellectual said to me - he said if the choice is between [Joseph] Stalin and [Adolf] Hitler, I'd pick Stalin, meaning Ted Cruz because he's more predictable. So there's real civil war inside the Republican Party.

Obama's even keel sometimes comes across as aloof or even cold.

Donald Trump's staffing up a pretty traditional, very conservative Republican government, not a populist outsider government, at least not yet.

Both the Obama and Romney campaigns said they pulled all their political ads today in observance of the September 11th anniversary. But politics wasn't very far offstage. The Obama campaign sees foreign policy as an advantage this year.

Until he announced his immigration policy last week, Obama had the support of most Hispanic voters - but not the enthusiasm they had shown for him in 2008. That may be changing in part because of the decision not to deport young immigrants whose undocumented parents brought them here as children.

[Donald] Trump has said he will accept the results of the election - if he wins. And he has said the only way he can lose the election is if it's stolen from him. Weeks before any votes were cast, he was predicting widespread voter fraud. So if he loses, what does he do?

I think that's why we see this mixed reaction - Republican congressional leaders like Paul Ryan speaking out very firmly, but Republican candidates not as much, with the exception of the candidates in the single digits like Jeb Bush or Lindsey Graham, who said how to make America great again tell - Donald Trump to go to hell.

Romney still enjoys the Republicans' traditional advantage among voters who are veterans, but the Obama campaign is confident it can chip away at that.

Senate races have tightened along with the presidential race. Watch to see how many Republican Senate candidates outperform Donald Trump - and how many hang on to their seats in states that he loses.

The Senate is the big prize. Until recently, Democrats felt confident they could get the four seats they needed to take back control if [Hillary] Clinton is in the White House and Vice President Tim Kaine held the tie-breaking vote.

Meanwhile, there are some traditional battleground states - like Ohio and Iowa - that are becoming older, whiter and less educated. That's turning them from true battlegrounds into more reliable red states.

As those states and others in the South and West become more diverse and educated, they will become harder for the Republican Party - in its current form - to win.

The aftermath of this extraordinary election [2016] could be just as surprising as the race itself.

What does [Hillary] Clinton do if she loses? Concede? Blame the Russians? Or the FBI?

What if he says [Donald Trump] plans to run again in 2020?

Even if [Donald] Trump concedes, some of his supporters have promised to take up arms against [Hillary] Clinton.

Hillary Clinton has had a small but persistent lead since June - anywhere from 2 to 5 points. The stock markets and the election betting pools are predicting a Clinton win.

In 2012, Hispanics were 10 percent of the electorate, underperforming their share of the voting-age population. Mitt Romney got 21 percent of their vote, and [Donald] Trump has been polling much lower than that.

Democrats came into the race with a structural advantage in the Electoral College. Their big blue wall - the states that Democrats have won in the past six presidential elections - gave [Hillary] Clinton a strong base to build on.

The [Hillary] Clinton campaign's recent travel schedule shows how seriously it takes this problem. She and her surrogates have held rallies in cities like Philadelphia, Detroit and Cleveland, trying to boost turnout among African-Americans.

For Democrats, anything less than 15 net pickups will be a disappointing outcome [in presidency race].

Donald Trump has said he wants to keep Medicare and Social Security the way they are. Congressman Price along with most Republicans are on record supporting voucherizing Medicare. So there are going to be some conflicts to resolve there.

African-American voters are not nearly as enthusiastic about [Hillary] Clinton as they were about [Barack] Obama.

[Hillary] Clinton has also struggled with key groups of voters.

This year [2016], however, polls show [Hillary] Clinton winning white college-educated voters by double digits.

If [Donald] Trump wins narrowly, Democrats can blame the loss on FBI director James Comey, who inserted himself late in the campaign in an unprecedented way.

A big win for [Hillary] Clinton would allow her to claim that the country rejected Trumpism, while a narrow win leaves her limping into office with the highest unfavorable ratings for any new president.

The winner's margin of victory also matters. If it's a squeaker, that will make the lessons learned for both parties much murkier.

If [Hillary] Clinton wins, history will also be made: She would be the first female U.S. president, of course, but also the only candidate in the modern era, other than George H.W. Bush, who managed to follow a two-term president of her own party.

Republican voters are coalescing behind [Donald] Trump, but many Republican elected officials still say they can't support him.

Donald Trump is a candidate who divided his own party more deeply than any presidential candidate has before.

[Donald Trump ] would make history in so many ways because he is a candidate who eschewed the traditional arts of political campaigns, including field organization, traditional advertising, debate preparation and policy knowledge.

If Donald Trump wins, it will be a seismic event.

If [Donald] Trump loses narrowly, it will make it much harder for the GOP to unify. Under that scenario, the Trumpists are likely to argue that the election was lost because the Republican establishment failed to rally around the choice their own voters made.

Does Donald Trump accept the results and concede graciously, pursue legal action, or tell his followers to take to the streets?

Republican candidates have won whites with college degrees in every presidential election since polling began.

White voters were 72 percent of the electorate in 2012, and their share of the population has shrunk a couple points since then. [Donald] Trump has had trouble winning certain segments of the white vote, such as suburban women and college-educated voters.

Mitt Romney got 59 percent of the white vote in 2012, considered by many to be a high-water mark with this demographic group. Can [Donald] Trump win a higher share of white voters than Romney and get more of them to turn out?

[Donald] Trump's path to victory depends on getting historic levels of support from white voters, and particularly large numbers of white, non-college-educated voters.

If she Hillary Clinton win just two of the three big battleground states - North Carolina, Florida and Virginia - she will have shut off Trump's path to 270 electoral votes, even if he wins the other toss-up states.

The Republican Party, right now, is a conservative populist party.

Jeb Bush was supposed to be the establishment candidate, but he didn't catch on. And the extraordinary thing about this Republican primary is that the establishment, moderate wing of the party has sidelined itself. They're not coalescing around one candidate as they have in the past.

Many people feel he did cross a line in a way he hadn't even done before and also that Republicans had to speak out because they believe Trump poses a danger to the party.

There's disgust with what people called a broken political system, and they're really angry at elites, whether it's the Republican establishment or particularly the media who they feel look down on them, tell them they're bigots.

There was tremendous animus to President [Barack] Obama. Many of people said he was un-American, not a Christian and worse.

There's a lot of anxiety about terrorism among the country at large. There's also a feeling the country has stagnated.