President Obama to Democrats: It’s time to hit the panic button

Via The Hill:

The election is coming, the election is coming!

That’s the message coming from President Obama as he tries desperately to rouse Democrats out of a midterm election stupor that could cost his party control of the Senate — and bury his agenda once and for all.

Obama has increasingly sounded like the nerdy kid in a bad horror movie constantly warning his friends to stay out of danger as he’s called on the Democratic base to not be complacent in 2014.

“You’ve got to pay attention to the states,” he begged at a recent fundraiser for the Democratic Governors Association. Obama lamented that Democrats don’t think state-level races in the 2014 midterms are “sexy enough.”

Raising cash for Senate Democrats in Virginia, Obama said Democrats tend to get “a little sleepy” and “distracted.”

“We’re good at Senate and House elections during presidential years — it’s something about midterms,” Obama said. “I don’t know what it is about us.”

And at a Democratic National Committee fundraiser in Boston, Obama said poor turnout could lead the party’s candidates to get “walloped.”

“It’s happened before and it could happen again,” said Obama, who remembers all too well the shellacking his party took in 2010, when it lost control of the House.

In 2014, the worry is that Democrats will lose the Senate if the base doesn’t come out, and it’s an outcome that political observers and Democratic strategists say is more and more plausible.

Democrats are defending 21 of the 36 Senate seats up this fall, and election watchers widely expect the party to lose seats as they protect a fragile six-seat majority.

Fasten your seat belts, folks!