The campaign season leading to the 2026 midterm elections on Tuesday included many examples of personal attacks, inflammatory rhetoric, threats of physical violence by political leaders and what some experts describe as deeply unethical uses of advertising dollars.
Use of derogatory, vulgar language in public by some politicians no longer seems especially unusual or politically destructive compared to political cycles years ago, analysts and other experts say.
In one example, President Donald Trump last week used a profanity when referring to Norway during a campaign rally. The president has also used derogatory language when speaking to the press, calling a reporter’s appearance “disgusting” this week. From Maine Senate candidate Troy Jackson telling Republican incumbent Susan Collins to “shut up” to participants in a campaign ad for Illinois Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton using a profanity to refer to Trump, some Democrats have used coarse language as well.
Incivility can be seen at the municipal level too, such as when Pemberton Township, New Jersey Mayor Matthew Bianchini charged at a constituent during a recent meeting, threatening violence.
The behavior extends to both parties: a 2025 Gallup poll found that a large majority of people — more than 60% — believes that Democrats and Republicans need to dial back the rhetoric. The poll also links dangerous rhetoric and political violence — a phenomenon some experts also worry is on the rise after the fatal shooting last year of conservative activist Charlie Kirk and attempts on Trump’s life.
Northeastern University experts agree that the advent of social media and its effects on political communication, branding and polarization have contributed to the coarsening of politics. The complete picture, they and others say, is nuanced.
Looking to history
History is filled with flare-ups of aggressive behavior and displays of incivility in public life that defy norms for conduct — even those thought to be timeless, said Ted Miller, a teaching professor of history at Northeastern University. He said “the standards of political decency have never really moved in a straight line.”
Miller points to the 1820s, for example, as a time period shot through with indecency.
In the lead-up to the 1828 election, which resulted in Andrew Jackson defeating John Quincy Adams to become the seventh U.S. president, Jackson’s allies accused Adams of corruption, suggesting that he had offered an American woman to the Russian czar as a gift. Adams’ supporters responded, painting Jackson as a violent, hot-tempered military hero with a reputation for dueling and assaulting people.
A few years earlier, Jackson’s allies had accused Adams of striking a “corrupt bargain” with Henry Clay to secure the presidency in the 1824 election. Jackson contended that Adams had secured the presidency through a backroom deal with Clay.
Miller said the decade remains a notable chapter in the history of U.S. political division, when personal attacks, accusations of corruption and bitter partisan rivalries helped shape the nation’s political discourse.
“Things got really dirty at that particular time,” Miller said.
Changes in media and politics
Miller said developments in political culture during the last 40 years or longer have helped normalize the more combative rhetorical style deployed by Trump and others. In the 1980s and 1990s, for example, former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich helped shift the tone of political discourse to one that embraced character assassination as a campaign strategy, Miller said.
In 1993, the death of Vincent Foster, a deputy lawyer who was part of President Bill Clinton’s White House, was ruled a suicide. Despite investigations concluding that Foster had died by suicide, some prominent Republicans, including Gingrich, publicly questioned that finding, helping fuel conspiracy theories surrounding the Clinton Justice Department’s handling of the case.
“It wasn’t exactly a time of high civility,” Miller said.
At the same time that Gingrich was urging other Republicans to “get tougher and play hardball,” the media was being transformed with the rise of so-called shock jocks, or crass radio personalities. Confrontational, foul-mouthed and deliberately provocative talk radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and Howard Stern pushed the boundaries of acceptable public discourse, Miller said.
The appetite for provocation found a powerful outlet in political advertising, where candidates could package attacks into increasingly hard-hitting campaigns.
Northeastern professor and Belgian native Koen Pauwels recalled his first exposure to American-style mudslinging in 2000.
“It was…extreme,” said Pauwels, distinguished professor of marketing at the university.
He said that candidates focused on their opponent’s character and policy proposals instead of defending their own.
“The negativity surprised me,” Pauwels said.
In late October, Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy ran an ad featuring his opponent Amy Acton’s mother questioning her daughter’s veracity. The two women have been estranged since Acton’s stepfather was charged with raping Acton when she was 12. He fled the state and never stood trial for the charge He died in 2004. The ad has since been removed
“It is reprehensible,” Yakov Bart, Patrick F. And Helen C. Walsh research professor of marketing said of the Ramaswamy advertisement. “It is a violation of moral and ethical standards – all of it.”
Pauwels said slinging mud at your opponent in print, over the airwaves or over the internet is amplified by U.S. politics.
Two-party systems, research has shown, are associated with what academics call “affective polarization,” or deep-seated dislike and distrust of people who support the opposing political party.
“You see a lot more negative ads in a two-party structure,” Pauwels said. “If you have seven parties, then as a candidate, you cannot waste too much time or money talking about how bad the other guy is, you actually have to talk about your own program.”
