After his loss to Merriam, Sinclair abandoned EPIC and politics to return to writing. In 1935, he published "I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked", in which he described the techniques employed by Merriam's supporters, including the then popular Aimee Semple McPherson, who vehemently opposed socialism and what she perceived as Sinclair's modernism. Sinclair's line from this book "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it" has become well known and was for example quoted by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth.