Politics & Power Quote by Dan Quayle

Dan Quayle’s line is a neat piece of partisan aikido: take a moral charge (abandoning the poor), flip it into a grievance about loyalty, and make the accused party the real victim. The punch comes from the bluntness of the last clause. “They never vote for us” is deliberately unvarnished, almost schoolyard in its logic, which is precisely why it lands with certain audiences. It doesn’t argue policy; it argues reciprocity. Politics becomes transactional: care is something you “earn” at the ballot box.

The subtext is sharper than it first appears. By redefining “abandonment” as a failure of the poor to choose Republicans, Quayle reframes poverty less as a social condition than as a political identity problem. It quietly absolves the party of responsibility for outcomes and relocates the burden onto the very people being discussed. If they’re not voting for us, why should we be held accountable for them? That’s the implication, and it’s a powerful permission structure for cutting programs without admitting indifference.

Context matters: late-20th-century Republican messaging increasingly leaned on “personal responsibility,” skepticism toward welfare, and a backlash to the New Deal/Great Society coalition that made low-income voters a Democratic cornerstone. Quayle’s quip compresses that whole strategy into one line: stop chasing constituencies you don’t win, and treat compassion as a partisan asset to be allocated, not a civic obligation. The irony is that it inadvertently concedes the original accusation’s premise: the poor aren’t part of the “us.”