Daily Inspiration Quote by David Axelrod

“Get off the bus” is a strategist’s way of making defection sound like civic hygiene. Axelrod isn’t painting politics as a battle of ideas so much as a vehicle careening toward a cliff, and he’s inviting “people of good will” to step away before they’re complicit in the crash. The metaphor does two jobs at once: it implies motion and inevitability (the ride is already underway), while also restoring agency (you can still pull the cord and exit). That tension is the point.

The phrase “on their side of the aisle” is equally loaded. Axelrod frames the hoped-for shift as something that must come from within the opposing coalition, not as a conversion to his team. It’s a credibility play: the most powerful rebuke of a party’s trajectory is delivered by its own passengers. Calling them “people of good will” softens the ask and narrows the target. He’s not predicting a mass ideological realignment; he’s appealing to institutionalists, normies, donors, staffers, and electeds who can no longer pretend the route is just a temporary detour.

The subtext is a familiar Axelrod move: political analysis dressed as moral forecasting. “More and more you’re going to see” makes the claim feel like a trend line, not a wish. “Not headed in the right direction” stays deliberately nonspecific, letting listeners project their own red lines: democratic norms, extremism, corruption, conspiracism. It’s coalition language built to recruit dissent without demanding a confession of past error.