Daily Inspiration Quote by Jim Bolger

Bolger is doing that deceptively plain statesman thing: narrating “the polls” as if they’re weather reports, then smuggling in a warning about the climate. The sentence is built on accumulation - “month after month” - to lull you into believing in stability, and then it snaps into “all of a sudden” and “enormous swing,” a jolt meant to reframe what the audience thinks it knows. He’s not really talking about numbers. He’s talking about the fragility of the assumptions that elites, pundits, and parties build their strategies on.

The intent is twofold. First, it’s a caution against complacency: if you’re treating incremental polling as a reliable trendline, you’re one shock away from being blindsided. Second, it’s a subtle rebuke to the political class’s desire to read inevitability into public opinion. “More volatile… than most people believe they have” points the finger back at those “most people”: the electorate isn’t the problem; the misdiagnosis is.

Context matters because Bolger governed through a period when many democracies were seeing partisan loyalties loosen and economic reforms sharpen social divides. In that environment, voters can behave less like members of permanent teams and more like consumers: responsive to events, leadership cues, and perceived competence, quick to punish, hard to retain. His phrasing turns volatility from a moral failing into a structural fact - and it doubles as a justification for humility in power. If the public can swing fast, governing requires legitimacy that can’t be banked in advance.