Politics & Power Quote by Theodore White

Once the primaries end, the adults leave the room. Theodore White’s line is less a lament about voter irrationality than a diagnosis of how the system rewards a particular kind of performance. The “nominating process” is politics pretending to be empirical: polls, delegate math, message-testing, the veneer of competition with rules you can diagram. It flatters journalists and operatives because it looks like a solvable puzzle. Then the general election arrives and the country stops behaving like a spreadsheet.

White is pointing at the pivot where persuasion replaces selection. Primaries are insider-adjacent rituals: they pick a champion by testing stamina, purity, and tribal credentials. The general election is a mass argument about identity, fear, resentment, hope - the stuff that refuses to stay “logical” because it’s not primarily about policy. “Leaves logic behind” carries a wry, almost weary judgment: not that logic disappears, but that it loses jurisdiction. The electorate isn’t a jury weighing evidence; it’s an audience responding to story, symbol, and belonging.

Context matters: White made his name chronicling the modern campaign in The Making of the President, watching television, advertising, and image-craft become the real machinery of politics. His sentence captures the moment the campaign stops being a contest among party factions and becomes a national psychodrama, where contradictions can be assets and factual coherence is optional. It’s also a subtle jab at the press - at the temptation to treat campaigns as rational games right up until the public reminds everyone what democracy actually runs on.