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From fainting fits to on-stage stalking, vicious personal ad campaigns and threats of incarceration, 2016’s U.S. presidential election campaign seems to be about everything but politics. Have Hilary Clinton and Donald Trump ushered in a new age of weird? What’s going on? In fact, their recent antics are just the tip of a very peculiar iceberg.

Before it began

What makes this year so unusual? For that, we have to look back into the past to another contender for weirdest election: 2000, when George W .Bush beat Al Gore as the result of a recount in Florida (becoming the first president elected without winning the popular vote since Benjamin Harrison in 1888). In previous years, there has always been some clear ground between Republicans and Democrats in the race for the Oval Office, but from that time onward, things remained very tight and there was a sense that every election was poised on a knife-edge. With political factions at a stalemate, this encouraged parties to look for other forms of vote-pulling power, which meant a greater emphasis on personality politics. It also removed the competition for the middle ground as charismatic factions like the Tea Party found there was more room to attract support on the margins. The stage was set for a strange new breed of politics that had less and less to do with policy.

The Republicans

The battle to become this year’s Republican contender was never going to be an easy one. Most of the candidates were polling similar numbers and voters said they saw little ground between them, so it’s possible that Trump managed to win in the end because he stood out as being the weirdest. But there were a few attempts to compete for that ground. Ted Cruz arguably cottoned on to the nature of the campaign sooner than anyone else when, in August last year, he set out to prove his masculine credentials by eating bacon off a machine gun. Ben Carson’s moment in the spotlight was less intentional, when he confounded archeologists everywhere with his insistence that the pyramids were used to store grain.

The Democrats

For all its reliance on personal jibes and viciousness, the Clinton vs. Trump weirdness is different than the Clinton vs. Sanders battle, which has been marked by Russian hacking of all things! The establishment has helped Hillary even though, curiously enough, Sanders has always polled better against Trump.

The alternative candidates

While the Republicans and Democrats savaged each other in the race to get nominated, other parties had their difficulties too. Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson inadvertently invented a new word in September when he responded to a question about the Syrian situation by asking, “What is Aleppo?” Merriam-Webster revealed that it was the most searched-for term during the debates, narrowly beating Trump’s ‘bigly’. He then ran into trouble when asked to name foreign political leaders. Put on the spot over North Korea, he said he did know but wouldn’t tell. At least he’s still at liberty, while Green candidate Jill Stein faces arrest if she goes to North Dakota for spray-painting a bulldozer. Stein argued that it was part of an important protest and has said she will cooperate, which would be complicated if she unexpectedly found herself elected. (Stranger things have happened this year alone.)M eanwhile, independent candidate Deez Nuts may not be a real person, but he was polling at 9% in North Carolina in August last year. It emerged that he was being played by a 15-year-old boy, Brady C Olson, who went on to endorse Bernie Sanders.

A question of stamina

Eventually, every politician can expect to make a slip, but not always a physical one. When Clinton slipped as she headed for her car on 9/11, it was initially passed off as a stumble, but anyone watching the footage could see she was barely conscious. Although she has looked well since and blamed the incident on pneumonia (standing in the hot sun for hours can’t have helped), Trump was quick to pounce on the incident as an indication that she didn’t have the stamina for the top job. He’s looked a little sniffly himself in the two debates since, however, with science fiction author Cory Doctorow – who presumably didn’t have anything better to do that night – counting 84 separate sniffs in the last one. This prompted Princess Leia herself, Carrie Fisher, to accuse him of getting his stamina from a certain white powder – an area which, she noted, she has some expertise.

Trump unleashed

Perhaps the biggest surprise about Trump’s derogatory remarks about women and rather more worrying comments on sexual assault, recently revealed on video, is that they surprised anyone. If there’s one thing Trump is not, it’s discreet, and anyone who observes him on Twitter – especially late at night – will have seen him behave like this before. With the scandal that ensued, however, he did the opposite of what most politicians would do in that situation: stand down humbly, slink away and hope to try again when voters had been distracted by something else. Instead, as a fifth of Republican office-holders dropped their endorsements, he declared that this made him free to take the gloves off and approach the election his way. The 2016 battle could get a lot weirder yet.

Getting the latest

By the time you read this, there will almost certainly have been another scandal or shocking revelation that has influenced the race. How can you stay up to date with such a fast-moving campaign? Social media is great for catching rumors quickly, but you can’t be sure if they’re true, and most of the popular press has now picked a side (openly or not). BAE News is a good source of unbiased news updated in a timely fashion, but you will need to check it regularly to keep up with the fast pace of developments.

Is this the weirdest election yet? We think so, but what happens after the results are in could end up being even weirder.