Among the more peculiar news stories of the week was the revelation that Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D, Beijing) has spent the past 20 years making a fictional family the centerpiece of his political philosophy.
Apparently, a strange open secret within the Schumer universe has long been the fact that he refers to “Mr. and Mrs. Bailey” all the time as his homing beacons for the purpose of understanding the American voter – and while his office has always known they were made up, the public has generally been given the impression that they are actual residents of Long Island, a typical middle class family with whom the Senator speaks regularly.
But now the secret is out – to the sublime embarrassment of the Schumer universe.
It’s funny, as far as it goes, but not all of the press is handling this accurately. Many are acting as though the very concept at the heart of it is odd. It’s not. So, here is a little inside baseball about how politics really works:
Many successful politicians – maybe even most – have concocted certain “amalgam identities” to use whenever they evaluate both their positions on specific issues, and the way they believe they should communicate those positions to the public.
For example, a candidate will ask his campaign staff, “How does Joe Sixpack see this issue?” and “How will Professor Loyola react to this?” And most of all, “Will Mrs. Soccer Mom be with us on this or will we lose her?”
Note that the typical campaign doesn’t just imagine a single, super-specific voter. The candidate divides his electorate into broad groups with generally similar interests and backgrounds, just as a pollster or focus group would, and the campaign tries to think of each issue from those voters’ perspective. They use nicknames for these amalgams that make it abundantly clear that they are not discussing real, individual persons; these are just representations of voting blocks.
There’s nothing wrong with a good campaign team thinking this way. It’s not strange; it’s perfectly normal.
Almost every jurisdiction has a ton of different demographics. A good representative should care about satisfying as many of those demographics as possible, not just so he wins office, but so he’s a good representative for them. So, these groups are represented by a nickname or a group name in campaign discussions, and they are normally kept as broad-based as possible.
Sure, there can be a malevolent purpose to this: “How do I best manage to con this group or that group?”
But there is no reason to assume such malevolence automatically. We should want our representatives to think of each subgroup, and to care about those groups’ political desires.
We should want our candidates to think about how each issue affects both the blue-collar workers and the white-collar workers, singles and families, young and old, rich and poor, military and civilian, entrepreneurs and salaried corporate employees, homeowners and renters.
The oddity about Schumer’s approach isn’t that he thinks of issues through the eyes of fictional voters; the oddity is that he seems to have consciously limited such thinking to just one very specific imaginary family.
Rather than viewing all of these constituent groups as broadly as possible like all normal candidates do, as described above, Chuck Schumer is reported to have built a massive backstory for this one fictional couple over the past 20 years. He has imagined what they do for a living, how many children they have, whether their kids are in college (and if so, what their majors are), what their debt load looks like, what their neighborhood is like and how they feel about it, and so on, and so on… and so on.
Chuck Schumer has built so much detail into the backstory of this fictional couple, in fact, that it no longer serves the purpose of a normal politician’s analytic process. It doesn’t really tell him how anybody thinks.
So in fact, the problem isn’t that he lives in this odd fictional world, relying on this one fictional couple for all of his decision-making.
The problem is that he has apparently done so at the exclusion of all actual demographic groups of real live voters in his district.
But wait, there’s more: since Senator Schumer is a national party leader, that means he has done so at the exclusion of all demographic groups across the country.
We don’t really know how absolutely he bases his decision-making on this one fictional couple. All we have are his 20 years of speeches citing this nonexistent couple, and the recent reports that insiders – his own staff, to some extent – truly believe that he really does use them as his primary guidepost.
So maybe this is being misreported. Maybe he really does think about blue collar and white collar groups, Christians and Jews, WASPs and recent immigrants, the young and the old, just like everybody else.
But maybe he doesn’t! And that would certainly explain how absolutely bonkers his party has become in recent years, under his pathetically poor leadership.
Maybe Chuck Schumer is psychologically fine, and this issue is blown out of proportion. Or maybe he really does have a somewhat tenuous grip on reality. It’s difficult to be sure.
But either way, any review of the policies of the Democratic Party under his leadership will confirm that our nation would be better off under the stewardship of someone else… Someone who takes the entire panoply of American demographics into account when evaluating policy and pursuing governmental change.
Chuck Schumer has a cousin in the entertainment business who purports to be a comedian. She’s no better at what she does than he is, but at least she’s in the right profession. Perhaps he should have joined her there – in the world of fiction – and left the vocation of governance to people better tethered to the real world.
Copyright 2025 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based international transportation and trade compliance trainer and consultant. President of the Ethnic American Council in the 1980s and Chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party in the 1990s, his book on vote fraud (The Tales of Little Pavel), his political satires on the Biden-Harris administration (Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes I, II, and III), and his first nonfiction book, “Current Events and the Issues of Our Age,” are all available in either eBook or paperback, only on Amazon.
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