Now, I know, I know. I know there is a lot of shit going on all around us these days. A lot of shit. All around us. Deadly shit. Despicable shit. Fascist shit. Existential level fucking shit.

But I gotta take a moment here to talk about Chuck Schumer and The Baileys.

I mean, jesus fucking christ, right?

I don’t blame you if this flew under your radar. In the scheme of things, maybe it’s not that important. Maybe. I don’t know. Maybe it should be though. Maybe.

On his August 10^th episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver did a segment about Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer’s decades old use of two fictional constituents, Joe and Eileen Bailey from Massapequa, N.Y., as some sort of stab at a homespun, Middle America, middle class, median voter political prop.

That’s right. A couple of made-up characters, created whole cloth by Schumer, going back to his 2007 book, Positively American, and still trotted out by him in 2025, as the archetypal middle-of-the-road voter Democrats should be targeting if the party ever wants to reclaim and retain power again. Joe and Eileen Bailey. Mythical, magical, make believe, pretend people; the windmills of his mind that Chuck Schumer’s been tilting at for 18 years.

That’s just fucking weird, right?

Imagine if throughout the entirety of your childhood, grandpa regaled you with stories about his dear old friends, let’s call them the Baileys, Joe and Eileen Bailey, say, a solid, stolid, bland, non-descript, blank page of a grandpa’s friends name. You knew everything about them because grandpa insisted on telling you about them, ad nauseum. How they all met. Eileen and your grandpa were an item for a while there until that ol’ stinker Joe showed up, all snazzy in his ROTC uniform and swept Eileen off her feet. But Joe wasn’t a guy you could stay mad at, grandpa tells you repeatedly. Joe and Eileen wound up married, had three kids. You knew their names but eventually didn’t really give a shit because, well, like Joe and Eileen, you never met them which, as the older you got, the more you found it kind of strange although, again, they were your grandpa’s friends and, like, who cares? At some point of time, in your teens, when you started spotting discrepancies in the stories grandpa told about his dear old friends, the Baileys, like, Joe and your grandpa fighting together in Korea? Grandpa’s not that old, right? The Korean War was like, in the 50s, wasn’t it? The early 50s. Oh, your grandpa says when you point that out, Did I say Korea? I meant, Vietnam. Finally, one night you ask your parents about grandpa’s dear old friends, the Baileys, and they smile tightly, nodding their heads. They knew this day would come. Just like when you found out there wasn’t really a Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. You see, son, they tell you, remember when you were a kid and you had those imaginary friends? Well, the Baileys are like that, but for old people like your grandpa. They go on to explain that grandpa was really, really sad when your grandma, his wife, Jean, died. Before you were old enough to really remember her. A lovely person. Your grandpa got very lonely and withdrawn, for a bit there. Everybody was very worried about him. The Baileys seemed to provide him some solace and consolation. A helpful way of him remembering your grandma in happier times.

Etc. & etc.

So, just like that, but your grandpa’s Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, one of the leading voices of the establishment wing of the Democratic party in the United States, and his entire political life has been shaped by a couple of pretend suburban voters from an imaginary sounding place called Massapequa.

Now I get, as John Oliver explained on his show, the idea of politicians modeling voters. A heuristic imagining of the values and beliefs you’re trying to represent. A What would Jesus do? variation for elected representatives perhaps a little lacking in motivating principles and ideals. Personalizing the political. Putting a human face on the nuts and bolts of policy.

But it’s a method for getting closer to the truth or clarifying an objective. It isn’t the actual thing itself. It isn’t supposed to be real or a factual representation of reality. It’s a process not an end point. At best, the Baileys should serve as a loose, targeted demographic, a dot on a curve. Instead, politicians like Chuck Schumer have made them the prototype of an Americana electorate circa the Reagan era.

Phantom voters, in other words. Mirages of ‘reasonable’ Republicans, radical centrists, the much-vaunted moderates. The honey pot for political consultants.

Vice President Kamala Harris went in full pursuit of The Baileys, aka the Lynne Cheneys, in last year’s presidential race to disastrous results. Their support never materialized in the numbers or places the Democrats needed, surprising absolutely no one, it seems, including Chuck Schumer who confessed earlier this year that, Probably both Joe and Eileen voted for Trump in 2024 like they had in 2016. Chuck’s pretend people turned out to be, alas, devoted if not enthusiastic Trumpers.

If that’s not weird enough, this seemingly futile pursuit of The Baileys by purported Democrats, moderates and centrists has not been declared an utter and catastrophic failure. Still. And again. Somehow the dire election results were caused by the purity voters on the left refusing to hold their noses and cast a ballot for a party who ignored them, demeaned them and focused all their attention on a demographic that stood diametrically opposed to their values and interests.

And this love affair with the likes of The Baileys isn’t just an American phenomenon. The Labour government in the U.K., in reaction to the rise in popularity of the Nigel Farage Reform Party, loves the Baileys. In Canada, Mark Carney and the Liberals are certainly Bailey-friendly, courting the supporters of Conservative leaders like Doug Ford and Danielle Smith with all its talk of tax cuts and cutting red tape and government spending. Key issues that, for carefully crafted and consultant heavy politicians hewing closely to their imagined centre of the spectrum, are very important to made-up model moderate voters like The Baileys.

The strategy worked more successfully for Labour and the Liberals than it did the Dems. Both won their respective elections, the former in a landslide, the latter with a solid majority. But already the British PM, Keir Starmer, is facing massive drops in his favourability polling and defections from the left of his party. In Canada, PM Carney seems mired in a pool of disappointment, elbows now down in exchange for a more conciliatory approach to matters with our American neighbours. Even with no real opposition from his left and the tarnished Conservative leader just newly re-installed, Carney’s honeymoon period in office somehow has felt loveless.

Would I go as far to call these pyrrhic victories?

Yeah, probably.

Because who actually benefits when non-conservative parties insist that the winning path is straight down the imagined middle through the livingroom of manufactured voters like Joe and Eileen Bailey? In the U.S., the answer’s obvious. But even where purported progressive or moderate, centre-right, centre-left parties form government, they adopt timid, conservative approaches to governance in order to appeal to voter who are nothing more than figments of their collective imaginations.