Who Would You Rather Follow-- Katy Perry Or Rick Perry?

Followers of which of these two would you define as a moron?

Democrats are worried that base voters aren't going to turn out in November-- and they should be worried. The collection of atrocious corporate shills and conservative shitheads Steve Israel recruited isn't going to inspire any base voters I ever heard of to go vote. Israel tells donors he plans to win the 17 seats the Democrats need to win back the House. It's more likely the net outcome will be a stinging loss. Elizabeth Warren beat a popular incumbent Republican senator in 2012, Scott Brown, the biggest recipient of Wall Street campaign funds for the cycle. And she beat him by a lot-- 1,678,997 (54%) to 1,450,044 (46%). That same day, Brown got 271,799 more votes than former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney in his presidential run. Elizabeth Warren won because she stood for something-- something big and bold and something ordinary working people could relate to. The turnout was 73%-- which is gigantic. The Democratic Party would turn out a lot more voters-- and win a lot more races-- if they recruited candidates like Liz Warren instead of the human garbage Steve Israel(in an obvious attempt at self-replication) specializes in.

Yesterday Aaron Blake, analyzing data from a Pew survey for the Washington Post asserted that people who would otherwise vote for Democrats don't care about politics. The Pew study claims that 10% of Americans are politically so disengaged that they can be referred to a "bystanders" and points out that "[n]one of this cohort say they’re registered to vote, and none say they follow government and public affairs most of the time (this compares with 48% of Americans overall). Virtually all of this group (96%) say they’ve never contributed money to a candidate running for public office."

Neither party has been able to motive them to buy into the system-- apparently more of a problem for Democrats than for Republicans, although the cohort has a mixture of liberal and conservative attitudes.

They are sympathetic to the plight of the poor, but as many say that government aid to the poor does more harm than good as vice versa. They express fairly liberal views on homosexuality and same-sex marriage, but 54% say abortion should be illegal in all or most cases.

Bystanders are young (38% are under 30), and nearly a third (32%) are Hispanic. A third of Bystanders are foreign born, a higher share than any of the other typology groups, including 29% total who are not citizens.

Asked about their interest in a number of topics, 73% of Bystanders say they have no interest in government and politics, and two-thirds (66%) say they are not interested in business and finance. So what topics do interest them? Health, science and celebrities: 64% of Bystanders are interested in celebrities and entertainment (vs. 46% of the public). And, in a sign of their youth, they are drawn to video games: 35% call themselves a “video or computer gamer” (vs. 21% of the public).

Blake wrote that "If Democrats could get these groups to care a little less about Tom Cruise and a little more about Ted Cruz, maybe they'd have a better voting coalition for the midterms." But he never asks why they should? So the Democrats can slip in the shitty array of candidates and incumbents to vote against their interests? Debbie Wasserman Schultz is the chair of the DNC and she not only voted against a sane marijuana policy in Congress, she's campaigning against a Florida medical marijuana initiative immensely popular with the Democratic base. Steve Israel has recruited anti-Choice, antigay, anti-environment candidates to run for Congress-- not to mention NRA shills galore-- and is spending the vast majority of money the DCCC rakes in from their idiot donors on incumbents with voting records often as bad as Republicans'.

It's easy to denigrate non-donors and unregistered citizens as "bystanders" and imply they are empty-headed fans of Tom Cruz and Katy Perry-- which is precisely what Blake did in the Post-- but might take a little tiny bit more analysis to see why at least some of these men and women find politics so totally unrewarding and worthless. Donate to the DCCC and you have just given money to Jennifer Garrison who's entire career is premised on being the most viciously anti-gay politician in Ohio, as well as vehemently ant-Choice and a big NRA backer. As if that wasn't enough to turn off the entire Democratic base, she makes her living by tricking her neighbors into signing away their property rights to avaricious fracking enterprises.

Chuck Todd and his colleagues at NBC were kvetching the Democrats have no defining issue for the midterms, right after the powerful Republican wing of the Democratic Party demanded they not run on economic populism.

We still don’t know what the fall campaign is going to be about. Is it health care? (Premium increases could be news in fall; then again, health care hasn’t received much national attention in the last two or three months). Will it be about the economy? (Maybe, maybe not -- see below for more on its limited midterm impact in the past.) What about immigration? (Possibly, but we haven’t seen Democratic or GOP campaigns eager to run on this subject, especially Democrats in the red states) Foreign policy? (Remember Ukraine or Bowe Bergdahl? Or the debacle that is America’s Syria policy?) Will the midterms be about President Obama and Democrats suffering from a thousand different cuts? (Perhaps.) Or will it simply be about the red-leaning map and the fact that key parts of the Democratic base just don’t turn out in midterm elections? (Could be.) Bottom line: Election Day is a little more than 100 days away, and it’s hard to come up with a defining issue, even as so many folks are so sure about the outcome.

And Blake responded by quoting yet another poll, one that shows the Democrats' best chance to win is by focusing on economic populism. As he points out, "the most popular description for the GOP is 'supports wealthy/business/not for the people.' This is the prevailing view of the Republican Party, far outpacing any other description. The top description for Democrats is pretty much the inverse -- that they are 'for the people' or 'for working people.'" This scares the Republican wing of the Democratic Party-- your Steny Hoyers, Debbie Wasserman Schutzes, Jim Himes, Steve Israels, Ron Kinds… all the New Dems and Blue Dogs-- as much as it scares the Republicans. Maybe that's why-- and why Blake ended his column with a well known Elizabeth Warren quote: "people of all political stripes think the economic system is rigged."