Politics & Power Quote by Hamilton Jordan

Democracy is supposed to feel like a crowd; Jordan makes it feel like a bottleneck. The line hinges on scale: "a tiny number of people" in "a few states". He’s not romanticizing voter power, he’s indicting the machinery that filters it down to a handful of gatekeepers. The bluntness is strategic. By stripping away party labels and policy specifics, he spotlights process as the scandal: legitimacy isn’t lost because Americans disagree, but because the menu is being written by a small, geographically accidental slice of the country.

The subtext is populist without being folksy. "These decisions" gestures at nominations, agenda-setting, and the insider ecosystems that form around early contests. It’s a critique of front-loaded primaries, donor gravity, media attention, and the kind of momentum politics where being first matters more than being representative. Jordan’s "we're left" turns voters into consumers of a product they didn’t design, forced to choose between options that have already been narrowed by rules, timing, and political class incentives.

"increasingly not attractive" is doing quiet work. It implies decline over time: a system that once produced plausible choices now reliably generates disappointment, polarization, or candidates optimized for the primary gauntlet rather than the general electorate. Coming from a public servant steeped in Washington’s realities, the remark reads less like conspiracy and more like weary diagnosis: the problem isn’t that people aren’t participating; it’s that participation is being routed through an unrepresentative choke point, and everyone can feel the mismatch.