It was October 1960, and John F. Kennedy was running for president against Richard M. Nixon, when he was asked an uncomfortable question during a high-stakes televised debate. Did Mr. Kennedy owe Mr. Nixon an apology for the shocking language used by his fellow Democrat, former President Harry S. Truman?
The profane sentiment in question: Anyone who voted for Mr. Nixon, Mr. Truman had recently declared, “ought to go to hell.”
Once upon a time, the unwritten rules of American politics imposed a strict decorum on the way politicians talked.
Lately, you may have noticed, the rules have changed. One particular four-letter word that would have shocked a 1960 audience is suddenly being tossed about with abandon.
President Trump has long been known for breaking norms with his crude language — and used a variant of the word in a startling Easter Sunday message to Iran just this week. But it turns out that Democratic politicians are now far more likely than Republicans to spice up their public statements with the particular swear word, according to a New York Times analysis of social media posts made by governors and members of Congress since 2020.
Exhibit A: Representative Susie Lee of Nevada, reacting to news that Mr. Trump would attend a Supreme Court hearing on birthright citizenship.
“So fucking fucked up,” she wrote on X last week in a post that she later deleted. “Sorry, I say fuck a lot these days.”
Some officials say their embrace of coarse language is simply an authentic response to a moment when many Democratic voters are enraged by Mr. Trump, especially on the issue of aggressive immigration raids. But the widespread embrace of the F-word also comes as Democrats try to rebut claims that they have fallen out of touch with everyday people. Sometimes it can feel like politicians are straining to sound relatable — and they run the risk of offending as many voters as they attract.
January 2026 was the month in the six-year window analyzed by The Times that Democratic officeholders used the F-word most frequently on the social media platform X, with 23 instances from 12 different lawmakers. (Democrats swear on Facebook and Instagram as well, but it occurs far less often than on X and was not part of the analysis.)
The foul language has seeped out of the internet and into real life, too. Democratic candidates are using the word — angrily, joyfully, self-righteously, sometimes performatively — in interviews, news releases and fund-raising pleas.
In California, former Representative Katie Porter, a candidate for governor, recently held up a whiteboard at a political event with the word fashioned as an expletive aimed at Mr. Trump. In Minneapolis, Mayor Jacob Frey demanded that Immigration and Customs Enforcement leave his city — using the word at a news conference to punctuate his fury after federal agents killed a local resident. In New Jersey, lawmakers are considering cheekily named legislation, the Fight Unlawful Conduct and Keep Individuals and Communities Empowered act, whose acronym suggests ire directed at ICE. It drew an ethics complaint over its “vulgar messaging.”
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, who studies political communication and is the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania, said the instinct to reach for coarser language was both an acknowledgment that society has become more accepting of it in recent years, and an effort by politicians to raise alarm and relate to voters.
“It’s an expression of frustration,” Dr. Jamieson said. “‘I no longer have the words in order to describe this — I’m going to move into taboo territory.’”
So, Who Are the Top Swearers?
Of all the Democrats using the F-word, one particular senator has turned the practice into a sort of unseemly art.
Senator Ruben Gallego of Arizona was cursing well before it was fashionable, dropping the word into public statements as far back as 2019.
In 2022, he called out Senator Ted Cruz, a Texas Republican, after 19 children were killed by a gunman in Uvalde, writing on X that “you care about a fetus but you will let our children get slaughtered,” and punctuating his post with the F-word. He followed up 21 minutes later — just in case his feelings were not obvious — and used the word twice more.
In The Times’s social media tally, Mr. Gallego was far ahead of the pack, using the word in at least 77 X posts from 2020 through the end of March 2026.
A spokesman for Mr. Gallego declined to comment, suggesting he would “just let his stats and history speak for itself.”
Representative Mark Pocan of Wisconsin clocked in as the No. 2 Democrat in The Times’s ranking, at 30 uses of the word, to which he replied: “All right!”
Mr. Pocan is a combative congressman who often feuds with the frequently swearing Republican representative in his neighboring district, Derrick Van Orden, the top Republican user of the F-word. Mr. Pocan suggested his saucy language was a product of an “average guy” upbringing and a desire to call out what he sees as the excesses of the Trump administration.
“I just watched another DOGE bro talking about why he was cutting grants, and watching the idiocy of that,” Mr. Pocan said in an interview. In his head, he said, he found himself using the word. “That’s all you can say.”
Representative Eric Swalwell, a candidate for governor in California, was next with 29 uses of the word, followed by Representative Robert Garcia, another Californian, with 23.
“I’m a pretty nice guy, but I swear, and I say” — that word — “a lot,” Mr. Garcia said in an interview. “Like most people, I’m pissed right now, and I’m angry.”
The most-viral post involving the word in the past six years belongs to Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, whose vulgarity-laden missive in February directed at Sean Hannity, the Fox News host, attracted 19.8 million views.
An R-rated Senate Ad
Perhaps the most startling use of the word came in February, in a campaign advertisement for Lt. Gov. Juliana Stratton of Illinois, a Democratic candidate for Senate.
Her 30-second ad begins abruptly, with a voter cheerfully declaring: “[Expletive] Trump!”
Five more Stratton supporters offer the same message. Even Senator Tammy Duckworth, the Illinois Democrat, gets in on it.
“They said it, not me,” Ms. Stratton says to the camera, with a grin.
Adam Magnus, the strategist who produced the provocative spot, said it drew 1.5 million views in its first 24 hours and helped present Ms. Stratton as an unapologetic fighter.
Mr. Magnus said Ms. Stratton wanted to channel the rage that Democratic voters were feeling toward Mr. Trump, but she decided not to use the word herself because it would not have felt true to her character.
“She wasn’t interested in using language that she doesn’t use” in real life, Mr. Magnus said. Such an act, he said, would be as if a candidate “had put on clothing that is not theirs or assumed an accent that is not theirs.”
At a Stratton event in February where attendees watched the ad for the first time, some older supporters questioned whether the spot was appropriate. But if any Illinois voters were offended, their distaste was not enough to swing the election: Ms. Stratton won the Democratic primary election last month by a wide margin.
Republican politicians have been far less likely to swear online over the past six years. Just eight of the 437 Republicans in the Times’s tally had used the F-word during that period, led by Mr. Van Orden’s 35 times, many of which were in replies to other X users.
Of course, Mr. Trump himself ushered in an entire era of coarser politics. In 2016, the release of the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Mr. Trump bragged in offensive terms about grabbing women’s genitals, forced media outlets to wrestle with what explicit language they would depict or censor.
Well before that, other prominent Republicans, too, were caught using vulgar language. Americans heard Mr. Nixon’s penchant for profanity in tape recordings of his private conversations that were later made public. In 2004, Vice President Dick Cheney faced backlash for deploying the F-word at a Democratic senator on the Senate floor.
But Dr. Jamieson, the communications professor, said the modern landscape felt unique because many of the past instances were private exchanges rather than gleeful public utterances.
In 1997, she prepared a report on all the vulgarities used on the House floor since 1985. A Times article about the report noted that it included “words like damn, whore, stupid, weirdo, nerd, bozo, idiot, fatso, scum, nitwit and several more that are unprintable in this newspaper.” (Playboy magazine helpfully reported the rest.)
Media outlets must still grapple with how best to deal with profanity, but they’re not the only ones. As Democrats contend with accusations that the party has grown elitist and out of touch, some of their efforts to swear have at times felt awkward or forced.
Last year, Representative Maxine Dexter of Oregon was mocked for her poorly constructed use of the word at a rally, which sounded to some almost like a proposition: “I don’t swear in public very well, but we have to [expletive] Trump.”
Representative Robin Kelly, who lost to Ms. Stratton in the Illinois primary, opened a campaign advertisement by saying, “Oh, hell no!” — dismissing her opponents’ squabbling as a distraction. But even that made her uncomfortable.
“They made me say that ‘hell,’” she said in an interview. “You know that’s not me to talk like that — I don’t like swearing.”
About the Data
The Times assembled a list of all governors and members of Congress who were in office between January 2020 and March 2026. The Times identified these politicians’ social media accounts on X, including their official accounts, campaign accounts and personal accounts. To do so, The Times consulted Junkipedia, a data analysis tool that monitors political discourse on social media, and conducted manual research on X.
The Times used Tweet Binder, a social media analytics company with access to comprehensive historical X/Twitter post data, to search for mentions of the uncensored F-word (i.e., not asterisked or intentionally misspelled), including in compound words. The Times’s tallies focus on original posts and replies, not reposts. The Times excluded instances where the poster was only quoting someone else’s F-word use. The tallies include only posts made while the officeholder was in Congress or serving as governor.
Two key limitations apply. X’s programmatic interface, which Tweet Binder queried for The Times, does not record posts deleted by their authors. Additionally, it does not search beyond the 280-character mark. Those scenarios, however, appear to be relatively rare. The Times compared Tweet Binder data to X posts collected by Junkipedia, which searches beyond the 280-character mark and returns posts that were later deleted but has incomplete historical coverage. A search of posts in 2025 returned only four that were not in the Tweet Binder data.
Reid J. Epstein, Stuart A. Thompson and Kim Bellware contributed reporting. Produced by Leo Dominguez.
Kellen Browning is a Times political reporter based in San Francisco.
The post Democrats Embrace a Four-Letter Word appeared first on New York Times.
