When Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz took the stage last week in Madison, Wis., for a campaign rally, he delivered a series of rapid-fire, interwoven jokes.

Walz said this Elon Muskthe billionaire entrepreneur turned Trump surrogate, “is on that stage jumping, jumping like a dipsh-t on these things, you know?”

The vice presidential candidate questioned Trump’s reported “exhaustion” amid a grueling campaign season: “When you whip yourself so hard, you don’t go back for seconds?”

The crowd laughed, but they certainly didn’t seem shocked.

Likewise, when JD Vance said the term — “dipsh-t” — was the best way to describe a Harris supporter at a rally in Wisconsin on Monday barely made the news.

Gone are the days of shock and awe over an “f-bomb” or “sh–” caught in a hot mic moment.

In America’s increasingly divisive election cycles, many of the so-called “seven words you can never say on TV,” as coined by comedian George Carlin, have actually been said on TV, on stump, at rallies and even alluded to in advertisements. .

Take, for example, an ad released over the weekend from Musk’s America PAC that jokingly and repeatedly calls out the vice president Kamala Harris a “C-Word”. Although the C-word in the ad is actually “communist”, the allusion is to a derogatory obscenity used to insult women. An X post showing the full ad was removed as of Monday afternoon.

This normalization of profanity is a direct result of “encumbering our public discourse and thickening it in the public square,” said Barbara A. Perry, professor of government and co-chair of the Presidential Oral History Program at Miller University in Virginia. Center.

Such “coarsening” of public discourse is not new, of course, and is evident across the media landscape, from TV to social media. Of course, it has made its way into political discourse, political rhetoric experts said.

“What’s acceptable has changed. It’s not just in the political arena,” said Derrick Green, chairman of the Department of Communication at Cedarville University, a Christian college in Ohio.

“Words that were sound or censored during broadcasts are no longer censored. What we would call cursing five, 10, 15 years ago is not seen as blasphemy.”

Both President Biden and former President Trump are known to rely on profanity in private, although it is Trump who has changed the game when it comes to profanity in politics.

The experts they spoke to Newsweek pointed out the now-infamous “Access Hollywood” tape in which Trump, while hosting “The Apprentice” on NBChe was heard to say that he likes to grab women by the “p—-“. Since then, there have been countless examples of his public use of profanity in and out of office, such as when he referred to Haiti, El Salvador and nations in Africa as “s—hole” countries in 2018.

Two weeks ago, at a rally in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, he referred to Harris as the “s—vice president.”

But if there’s any discomfort with the speech, it’s not evident in the polls: Harris and Trump enter Election Day virtually tied, according to FiveThirtyEight and other aggregators of the most polls with statistical reputation.

“This thickening of speech caused by Donald Trump there doesn’t seem to be a reason people won’t vote for him,” said Perry, the UVa professor.

Trump has changed the rules not only for himself, but for how politicians across the spectrum present themselves, Green added.

“He’s represented himself as a regular guy running for president, and that’s how regular people talk … The idea that it’s okay for a politician to present himself as, ‘I’m just a regular person.’ It’s no longer about looking presidential… the landscape has become more casual.”

Certainly, there have been plenty of instances in modern presidential history where the commander-in-chief has used profanity, Perry said.

She noted that President Richard Nixon could be heard cursing in frustration on the Watergate tapes, and President John F. Kennedy’s nanny once recalled that his cursing was inadvertently picked up by her daughter’s toy doll while she was recording sounds.

In the 2000 campaign, he grabbed a hot mic George W. Bush calling a New York Times reporter a “major league a-hole”. In a throwback to the relatively strange campaigns of not too long ago, the moment became a short campaign issue, in which Times he himself did his best report the insult using a euphemism. (Bush dismissed it, saying he was a “plain-spoken guy”).

In particular, female candidates do not tend to curse on the trail. While Harris has been known to use colorful language behind closed doors, she hasn’t let a stray bomb slip this campaign (although she has throw one during an official event in May, where she told a group of Asian American activists, “Sometimes people will open the door for you and leave it open for you. Sometimes they won’t, and then you have to kick that f—– door down!”)

Also, Hillary Clinton — is also known to let the insults fly in private — was careful not to lose any during her run for president.

“Women are held to a higher standard when they’re running at a lot of levels,” said Kelly Dittmar, associate professor of political science at Rutgers University and director of research and fellow at the Center on Women and American Politics at the Eagleton Institute of Politics.

“They will be more wary of meeting unqualified or unprofessional people than their male counterparts. It’s not that women can’t do it, but they’re used to being held to a higher standard.”

But even in that there are shades of gray.

Governor of Michigan. Gretchen Whitmera Democrat, ran her successful campaign for governor on a promise to “fix the damn roads.” Harris singled out Walz for his cable news shows, which included a clear warning about republicans to “mind their own business”.

And even Harris raised an eyebrow or two when she said during her nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention that her mother taught her to “never do anything by halves.”

That has changed. Politicians have sworn as long as there have been politicians. But only recently has their blue language come into the public record through official remarks. It may be the last vestige of bipartisanship left in Washington.