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Who really said it

Republicans buy sneakers, too

Attributed to Michael Jordan b. 1963 · NBA guard, 1984–2003 · six titles with the Chicago Bulls
Attributed In copyright

Jordan has acknowledged the remark — in The Last Dance (2020) he said he made it “in jest” on a team bus — but there is no contemporaneous record of it. The sentence did not reach print until 1995, in Sam Smith’s Second Coming, where it appears secondhand and in a different form: “Republicans buy shoes, too.” The “sneakers” wording that became famous is a later rendering.

Last verified 17 Aug 2026 · how we verify · spot an error?

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Unconfirmed quote & credit

“Republicans buy sneakers, too” attributed to Michael Jordan, on declining to endorse Harvey Gantt in the 1990 North Carolina Senate race against Jesse Helms. No contemporaneous record exists; the line first reached print as "Republicans buy shoes, too" in Sam Smith's Second Coming (HarperCollins, 1995), reported secondhand. Jordan acknowledged the remark — made "in jest" on a team bus — in The Last Dance (ESPN, 2020). Via Quotle.info

Can you use it?

Still under copyright (rights held by Sam Smith and HarperCollins Publishers (Second Coming, 1995)). A short, credited quote is generally fine for talks, teaching, and internal decks; for commercial, published, or large-scale reuse, get permission.

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In context

Evoking the world of Michael Jordan — NBA guard, 1984–2003 · six championships with the Chicago Bulls. Theme: "Republicans buy sneakers, too". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.

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Provenance

Where the sentence actually comes from

Earliest print appearance
Second Coming: The Strange Odyssey of Michael Jordan
Author & imprint
Sam Smith · HarperCollins, New York, 1995
Wording there
“Republicans buy shoes, too” — reported secondhand
Occasion referred to
1990 North Carolina Senate race, Helms vs. Gantt

And, as he later told a friend, “Republicans buy shoes, too.” Second Coming, preface (1995)

The surrounding passage, quoted by Slate, has Smith describing Jordan’s tight management of his own image before turning to the Gantt–Helms race: approached about lending his name, Jordan declined, saying he was not into politics and did not really know the issues. Note the two problems for anyone citing this as the source of the famous line — the noun is shoes, and Smith attributes it not to himself but to “a friend” Jordan told.

Book scan
Second Coming (HarperCollins, 1995) at the Internet Archive
Slate's reconstruction of the quote's provenance

How the line travelled

  • November 6, 1990 — the race. Jesse Helms holds his North Carolina Senate seat against Harvey Gantt, the former Charlotte mayor, 52.58% to 47.39%. Jordan, the state’s most famous son, makes no endorsement. Election record ↗
  • 1995 — the line reaches print. Its first known appearance is in the preface to Sam Smith’s Second Coming, and in a different shape: shoes, not sneakers, and secondhand — Smith writes that Jordan said it to a friend. Slate ↗
  • 1996–1999 — it hardens into a quotation. A 1996 Richmond Times-Dispatch column carries it in the “sneakers” form; Jason Zengerle used it in The American Prospect in 1997; David Halberstam’s Playing for Keeps (1999) carried the idea as a paraphrase, without quotation marks. Nyhan’s 2005 audit ↗
  • 2016, then 2020 — denied, then owned. Jordan’s spokeswoman tells Slate he denies ever saying it. Then, in The Last Dance, he says the opposite: it was a joke on a team bus, and he sent Gantt a contribution rather than record a PSA. ESPN ↗
In copyright

The remark itself was spoken privately and was never published at the time, so there is no old, free-standing document behind it. Every text that records it sits inside a copyrighted modern work — Sam Smith’s Second Coming (HarperCollins, 1995) and There Is No Next (Diversion Books, 2014), and ESPN’s The Last Dance (2020) — all long after the 1931 U.S. public-domain line, so nothing here can be treated as public domain.

Rights status is our research, not legal advice — and copyright varies by country and edition. For commercial or published use, confirm with the rightsholder. See terms.

Fact-check

What the internet gets wrong about it

The surprise here is not the speaker. Jordan says he said it. Almost everything else attached to the sentence — the wording, the room, the motive, the date it can be documented — is off.

“Republicans buy shoes, too” Earliest printed form

That is how Sam Smith set it down in Second Coming in 1995, the line’s first known appearance in print. “Sneakers” is the version that spread through newspapers — and the version Smith himself switched to when he retold the story in 2014. Slate ↗

Harvey Gantt’s campaign Not who he told

The line is usually staged as Jordan’s reply to the campaign. By his own 2020 account it was said on a team bus to Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen; the actual request reached him through his mother, who asked him to record a PSA for Gantt, and he sent a contribution instead. ESPN ↗

A cold marketing calculation Disputed by the witness

Smith, the only journalist who claims to have heard it, describes a joke delivered with a smile, and in 2020 called it a show of defiance at the NBA’s preference that its stars avoid politics — not a statement of commercial philosophy. Awful Announcing ↗

A documented 1990 quotation No contemporaneous source

Nothing from the campaign itself records it. Brendan Nyhan and Jason Zengerle, writing in 2005, found the earliest printed citations to be years later and secondhand, and noted that David Halberstam — a careful reporter — carried the idea as a paraphrase without quotation marks. Nyhan, 2005 ↗

Michael Jordan, through 2016 Reversed

In 2016 his spokeswoman Estee Portnoy told Slate by email that Jordan denies ever saying it. In 2020 he told the opposite story on camera: “I don’t think that statement needs to be corrected because I said it in jest.” ESPN ↗

Jordan no longer denies the sentence — he says he said it, as a joke, on a bus. What no source can supply is a contemporaneous record of the exact words, which is why the line still travels in two versions and why “attributed” is as far as the evidence goes. Jordan’s own account, 2020 ↗

Context

Why one sentence about shoes has outlived the election

The 1990 North Carolina Senate race was not an ordinary contest. Jesse Helms, the Republican incumbent, was running against Harvey Gantt, the former mayor of Charlotte, who would have become the state’s first Black senator; Helms’s campaign closed with the notorious “White Hands” advertisement attacking affirmative action, and he won by a little over five points. North Carolina’s most famous son stayed out of it. Slate reconstructed the whole episode in 2016 ↗

The criticism was immediate and came from inside the house. Arthur Ashe tried to talk Jordan into endorsing Gantt and later wrote that Jordan had made a mistake; Jim Brown said in 1991 that Jordan’s “main concern is the demands of corporate America”; Kareem Abdul-Jabbar said in 2015 that Jordan “took commerce over conscience.” None of them were quoting the sneakers line — it had not been printed yet. The sentence arrived afterward and became the shorthand for an argument that already existed. Slate ↗

It was thrown off the cuff.

The afterlife of the line

Sam Smith — the one journalist who says he was there — has spent years arguing the line was misread. In 2020 he described it not as a marketing calculation but as a joke made with a smile, a show of defiance at the NBA’s preference that its stars stay clear of politics. Asked in 2016 to explain the discrepancy between his two published versions, or whether he had heard it firsthand, he declined: “It was 30 years ago.” Smith’s 2020 clarification ↗

The phrase long ago stopped belonging to the story that produced it. In 2018 the sports commentator Clay Travis used it as the title of a book, Republicans Buy Sneakers Too: How the Left Is Ruining Sports — an argument the original remark, on Smith’s telling, was not making. Wikipedia’s article on the quote ↗

Explore

Filed under

More provenance-checked quotes on the same theme, each with its reuse status.

Power Doubt

Go further

Dig deeper

Trusted places to keep pulling the thread — primary archives, fact-checks, and scholarship. We show how we used each one before you leave.

"Republicans Buy Sneakers, Too" — did he really say it?slate.com

Laura Wagner's 2016 investigation — the fullest reconstruction: the 1995 Second Coming passage, the 1996 newspaper migration, and Jordan's flat denial through his spokeswoman.
An elusively sourced quotebrendan-nyhan.com

Brendan Nyhan's 2005 post, with Jason Zengerle, first flagging that the quote cannot be traced to a primary source and that Halberstam had only paraphrased it.
Jordan stands firm on 'Republicans buy sneakers, too'espn.com

ESPN's May 2020 report of Jordan's own account in The Last Dance — said in jest on a bus with Horace Grant and Scottie Pippen.
Republicans buy sneakers, tooen.wikipedia.org

Wikipedia's dedicated article on the quote, covering the shoes/sneakers split, Smith's two accounts, and the phrase's later political afterlife.
Second Coming (1995), Sam Smitharchive.org

Scan of the HarperCollins first edition — the book in which the line first appeared in print, held at the Internet Archive.
Sam Smith clarifies the remarkawfulannouncing.com

Smith's 2020 account of the exchange he says he witnessed, describing it as defiance aimed at the NBA rather than a commercial calculation.

The man who (eventually) said it

Michael Jordan

Michael Jordan

Born 1963 · NBA guard, 1984–2003 · six championships with the Chicago Bulls

Michael Jeffrey Jordan (born February 17, 1963) played fifteen NBA seasons between 1984 and 2003 and won six championships with the Chicago Bulls. He was also one of the most heavily marketed athletes who has ever lived: Nike introduced the Air Jordan in 1984, and the shoe line is the reason a throwaway sentence about footwear and voters became the most-quoted thing he never said in public. For most of his playing career he declined to take political positions — a stance he revisited in 2016, when he condemned police violence and announced $1 million donations each to the Institute for Community-Police Relations and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

For writers & researchers

Cite this

Earliest documented source

Earliest documented in Sam Smith, Second Coming: The Strange Odyssey of Michael Jordan—From Courtside to Home Plate and Back Again (New York: HarperCollins, 1995), where the line reads “Republicans buy shoes, too”; the “sneakers” wording is Smith’s own in There Is No Next (Diversion Books, 2014). Michael Jordan acknowledged making the remark in The Last Dance (ESPN, 2020).

This verification page

Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Republicans buy sneakers, too’?” Last verified 17 Aug 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/republicans-buy-sneakers-too/

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