Hypothetical voters

After the Democratic Party successfully – and somewhat unexpectedly – recaptured the Senate in the 2006 midterms, New York senior senator Chuck Schumer wrote the 2007 book Positively American. In his role as chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, Schumer recruited candidates who ran strongly or outright won in races that plenty of prognosticators would have written off even a few months before the 2006 midterms. So whatever you want to say about Chuck Schumer now, in 2006, he had his finger on some sort of pulse.

In Positively American, Schumer introduced his best friends who live in his brain: Long Island's own Joe and Eileen Bailey (both née O'Reilly – Schumer wanted them to seem less Irish for the book). As Jeffrey Goldberg in the New Yorker memorably excerpted:

The Baileys live in Massapequa, in Nassau County, a town that is invariably known on Long Island as “Matzoh-Pizza.” The Baileys are both forty-five years old: Joe works for an insurance company, Eileen is a part-time employee at a doctor’s office. They worry about terrorism, and about values, and they are patriots—“Joe takes off his cap and sings along with the national anthem before the occasional Islanders game,” Schumer wrote.

The kicker of Goldberg's article involves two Massapequa residents actually named Bailey, whom Schumer met. The real Mr. Bailey had a goatee. “Joe Bailey would never have a goatee," Schumer groused to Goldberg.

Last week, Schumer led the charge to muster some measure of Democratic support to push a heavily criticized, Republican-written continuing resolution through in order to keep the government funded. (Whatever you think of this choice – I think it stinks! – it's undeniable that Schumer burned what little political capital he possessed for no fucking reason and played an already bad hand about as badly as he possibly could.) In the wake of those events, the Baileys have come under some scorn. The idea that Schumer doesn't listen to constituents but, rather, the "Irish tulpas" (a phrase I lifted from someone on Bluesky) in his head has only been bolstered by his choice to postpone a book tour where he might have to meet with various angry Americans.

The Senate is, by design, a highly cloistered body, one that remains a little outside the normal concerns of politics. Yes, senators can and will lose reelection campaigns, but they serve six-year terms, and the very structure of the body is designed to overrepresent rural areas and slow all discussion to a crawl, if not grind it to a halt. But even by the standards of American history, the last few months have shown how little hunger senators – regardless of party affiliation – have for a genuine fight. Yes, individual Democratic senators have been interested in pushing back against the worst of the Trump administration and Elon Musk's DOGE bullshit. Yet the body as a whole – and the polity of Democratic senators within it – has shown little interest in fighting back against the White House.

Just how much of that rests on Schumer's shoulders is not something I can possibly tell you from this distance. Nor can I tell you if Schumer is still consulting with the Baileys when he needs to make tough calls. Maybe he dropped the act at some point in the intervening 18 years. But his continuing resolution vote has the feeling of something the Baileys heartily backed.

Now, I am not a political reporter or a political science scholar or anything like an expert. But I am someone who spends lots of time in communion with imaginary people in her head. (Buy my book!) And in thinking about the Baileys, I have been put in mind of my newsletter from last year about how often the children we most try to protect are hypothetical. The Baileys aren't real people. They are, instead, hypothetical voters.

If we keep stringing out Schumer's hypothetical, then my first question would be: Do the Baileys age? If they do, then they're 63 years old, and the odds are quite good they backed Trump in at least one of the last three elections, which might explain some of Schumer's desire to find some sort of common ground with the president. But I sort of suspect the Baileys don't age. Forty-five, after all, is an age that seems chosen to land in almost the exact middle of the human lifespan. In that case, they were born in 1979 or 1980, which is to say that either they're elder millennials (if you use some of the earlier start dates for that age cohort) or they're about to be. And as an elder millennial, I don't know a single fucking person at all like the Baileys.

Does Chuck Schumer imagine the Baileys having the internet entering their home as teenagers? Does he imagine their teens and 20s being rocked by crisis after crisis, from 9/11 on into the 2007-08 financial crash? Does he imagine them struggling to afford to raise one child, much less multiple children? Does he picture them listening to, like, Beyoncé or Taylor Swift or any hip hop at all? Or is he imagining an extension of his own past into an eternal present?

The odds are extremely good that the answer to that last question is "Yes, he is." That answer is not specific to Schumer either. We all do this, and it gets harder to imagine a life experience different from your own the older you get, hence all the stories about millennial and Gen-Z kids talking with boomer parents about the job hunt and getting advice to simply walk in and ask for a job interview or some other similarly dated notion. What's more, the thing where it becomes hard to imagine growing up in a world different from the one you grew up in starts almost immediately after you leave high school. TikTok and YouTube are littered with videos of Gen-Z adults reacting with confusion and fear to the slang, customs, and general mien of Gen Alpha kids and teens. We are always aging out of what is cool and slightly terrified by what comes behind us.

Yet when one lives in a country where the vast majority of our political leaders have a vision of the country that is firmly wedged in the late-Cold War era – barely even the 1990s! – it becomes harder and harder to do anything that resembles real political progress. And in that vacuum, chaos agents will always reign because they don't care about progress so much as breaking shit to achieve their own often nebulous ends. Politics is storytelling, and the more your story is designed to talk to people who simply don't share your reality, the more you are unable to shape that reality.

The Democratic Party's single biggest issue, to my mind, is the way in which it is constantly attempting to poll-test issues until it can find a position that will offend as few people as possible. People can usually smell through these attempts to please everybody all of the time – see also: Gavin Newsom's current polling numbers – but what I think is most pernicious is the way that this addiction to finding the least objectionable positions traps the party as a whole in the land of the hypothetical voter. The more you try to appease the broadest swath of people, the more you're targeting absolutely no one at all, which is to say the more you only end up appealing to fictional people.

The worst thing about the Baileys isn't that they are imaginary; it is that imaginary people have no real impetus to change in the way the rest of us do. Even if Chuck Schumer has given the Baileys character arcs or the like, he can always freeze them at the point that will make the most sense to him. They never have to live anywhere other than the world Chuck Schumer is most comfortable with. If only that were true with all of us out here in reality.

Programming note: I'm having Major Surgery tomorrow, Thursday, March 20. I should be more or less back to my normal self by the time the next Wednesday edition is released on April 2, but it might be a slightly lighter lift of a newsletter at that point. On the other hand, I will have watched so much stuff while recovering?? See you then!

A Good Song

The free edition of Episodes, which (usually) covers classic TV and film, is published every other Wednesday, and the subscriber-supported edition of Episodes, which covers more recent stuff, is published every Friday. Paid subscribers also have access to the weekly Monday Rundown. This newsletter is written by Emily St. James and Libby Hill. If you have suggested topics, please reply to the email version of this newsletter or comment (if you are a paid subscriber).