#McConnelling

About

#McConnelling is a video remix fad that involves setting an alternate background music to U.S. Republican senator Mitch McConnell's election campaign advertisement released in March 2014. Since the introduction of the idea through Jon Stewart's The Daily Show, numerous remixes of the ad featuring unfitting music have emerged online with the Twitter hashtag.

Origin

On March 11th, 2014, Mitch McConnell released his first campaign ad^[1] titled "McConnell Working for Kentuckians" for this year's general election, in which the senator and his wife are shown smiling while peppy music plays in the background.

Among many of those who found the video to be a comedy goldmine were the writers of Jon Stewart's The Daily Show^[2], who decided to pair the video with alternate tracks of all genres and feature them on the program on March 13th, 2014.

Spread

Immediately following the The Daily Show airing, dozens of remixed videos began to flood on to YouTube^[4] and Twitter^[7] under the hashtag #McConnelling (shown below). According to social analytics service Topsy^[8], #McConnelling was mentioned nearly 10,000 times within 24 hours. As previously seen with other hashtag-based political satires launched by TV pundits, the remix meme was instantly picked up by The Washington Post, Chicago Sun-Times, Mediate and Talking Point Memo.

External References