Cocaine Mitch

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Part of a series on Don Blankenship Campaign Advertisement. [View Related Entries]

About

Cocaine Mitch is a nickname for American politician Mitch McConnell. While the nickname was originally intended to insult McConnell, supporters of the politician have adopted it as term of endearment.

Origin

On April 30th, 2018, Don Blankenship, a U.S. senate primary candidate, released a campaign advertisement in which he says, "One of my goals as U.S. senator will be to ditch 'Cocaine Mitch.'" The advertisement referenced a 2014 article in The Nation magazine reporting that 40 kilograms of cocaine were found on a cargo ship owned by the family of McConnell's wife.^[1]^[2]

Spread

On May 3rd, 2018, the Vimeo ^[3] account for Don Blankenship for U.S. Senate uploaded a campaign ad. The video features Blankenship accusing Mitch McConnell of receiving money from his "China family" and having McConnell's "China people" run attack ads against Blankenship. He also refers to West Virginians as "West Virginia People" and McConnell as "Cocaine Mitch."

That day, Twitter ^[4] user @LPDonovan tweeted the Don Blankenship campaign ad with the caption "What in the world did I just watch." The post (shown below) received more than 8,200 retweets and 25,000 likes in 24 hours.

After Don Blankenship lost the primary, McConnell's campaign Twitter^[5] account, @Team_Mitch, posted an image of McConnell photoshopped onto the poster for the television series Narcos, which follows the exploits of real-life drug lord Pablo Escobar. They captioned the tweet "Thanks for playing, @DonBlankenship. #WVSen." Within five months, the post received more than 3,500 retweets and 12,000 likes (shown below, left).

Following the tweet by @Team_Mitch, other supporters of McConnell adopted the nickname as a term of endearment, ironically referring to him as a gangster (examples below).

On October 10th, 2018, The Daily Dot published an article about the meme.