Even Republican cheerleader senator Mitch McConnell despairs over his party’s increasing weirdness.
In 2022, explaining away the GOP’s midterm election performance (read: not good!) he basically said, yikes, what can you do? “My view was do the best you can with the cards you’re dealt,” he said of his fellow Republicans. “Now, hopefully, in the next cycle we’ll have quality candidates everywhere and a better outcome.”
McConnell is the guy at the rager who’s telling people that he “came in with those guys, but not, like, with those guys” and hissing through his teeth at his colleagues to “try to act normal.”
No one is immune, no matter their political affiliation. Former president George W. Bush was ahead of the curve in fingering Trump and his cohort as weirdos, a sense of cringe transcending any party loyalties he might have. Officially, he attended Trump’s presidential inauguration in January 2017 to witness the peaceful transfer of power. Unofficially, he reportedly turned to his companions as they left the dais and said, “That was some weird shit.”
TikTok and internet culture aren’t the only fields Harris’s campaign has pulled from. Modern dating parlance lends us the idea of “the ick,” a term so relatable it was recently added to the Cambridge Dictionary.
It’s defined as “a sudden feeling that you dislike someone or something or are no longer attracted to someone because of something they do.”
Once you get the ick, you can’t un-ick. Ever. In dating, that might mean losing someone’s number. In politics, the Democrats are hoping that voters’ ick will translate at the polls. Picture senior Democrats pulling voters aside like they’re their closest girlfriends and muttering, “Really? Him? But he’s so…weird.” Politicos can’t go all in, Walter Masterson style, but they can get away with a deftly wielded light trolling.
Of course, the Unified Theory of Ick (Politics Edition) is nonpartisan, as evidenced by a severe case of the ick being the straw that broke the Biden-reelection-campaign-shaped camel’s back just days ago.
As Lawrence points out, “If you’re making an attack, and then there’s something that happens that reinforces that, it’s really hard to get away from it. The Biden debate, going into it, [Republicans said], ‘he’s old, he’s old, he’s old,’ and then he looked old. There’s just no turning away from that. You can’t get that out of people’s heads.”
Again, it goes both ways: “And so you have Democrats saying, ‘they’re weird freaks, they’re weird freaks, they’re weird freaks,’ and then old clips of JD Vance come out talking about cat ladies and talking about how people without children shouldn’t be allowed to vote. Donald Trump talking about Hannibal Lecter like he’s a real person. All of that stuff just kind of builds on itself until it becomes a part of the zeitgeist.”
Progressive voters are noticing this linguistic shift, and they’re on board.
One person on X wondered why “anyone at all” would vote for a Republican. “Hateful, cruel, misogynistic and like, vibey in a weird unsettling way,” they wrote.
