Hot Ones: Why Attractive Candidates Win
Yes, voters judge books by their covers. So take the covers seriously
Everyone “knows” that Richard Nixon lost the first televised presidential debate—and thus, quite possibly, the 1960 election—to Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.,’s uncle because he looked sweaty and incel-y on television:
Like many bits of popular political history, there’s not a heck of a lot of hard evidence for this. James N. Druckman, one of the top living political scientists, wrote in The Journal of Politics in 2003 that there was a lot of smoke but no fire—at least at the time:
The Kennedy-Nixon debate is so widely treated as definitive evidence about the independent impact of television that the result may be a complacency that inhibits more direct investigation into television's influence (Schudson 1995). Yet, the largely unrecognized irony is that there exists no valid empirical evidence that images played any role in the debate. In their exhaustive review, Vancil and Pendell (1987) find that most of the evidence is anecdotal and impressionistic with one exception—a survey by a market research firm, Sindlinger & Company.
Even by 1960, there was so much penetration for TV that anyone who didn’t have a television was already more likely to be a Republican voter (in particular, an anti-Catholic, rural, Protestant voter) than a Kennedy supporter. On the other hand, if you’ve ever seen a clip of it, you know that Nixon did look sweaty, gross, and sick—largely because he was actually ill!—and Kennedy looked good, even though as we also know now he was more or less a walking zombie propped up by a CVS worth of pharmaceuticals. Druckman ran an experiment (back then, you could get a JOP with an N of 171 undergraduates) and found that, in fact, Nixon did score better with video watchers than audio listeners. Post hoc, then, there was evidence for the claim.1
Evidence or no, Nixon learned from the episode, and by 1968 he had become a skilled manager of a media-savvy operation. Indeed, obsession with visuals and images became a leitmotif of his subsequent political operation—more generally, Nixon was cynically poll-obsessed and used public opinion surveys deftly to maximize his public perception (before you laugh, remember that he did win in a landslide in 1972!).2 The broader public and political professionals learned, too, which is why over time politicians started essentially getting glow-ups—or, rather, politicians who were good at media (Reagan, Clinton) started displacing folks with faces for smoke-filled rooms.
A lot of folks, if they think about this, realize this sort of thing is bad for democracy. The idealized form of democracy, after all, is one in which citizens reason together and select candidates based on appeals to noble virtues, sound policy analysis, and blah blah blah.
Look, we all know that that isn’t how any of this works, so what we need to know is: how much of an advantage do hot politicians have?
Enough! Enough that folks who vote in primaries, give to candidates, or recruit candidates after talks in the group chats that rule the world should think seriously about whether a candidate is hot or not. Because it does matter.
More Attractive Candidates Win More
There’s a substantial literature on this topic. A classic article by Gabriel Lenz and Chappell Lawson in the American Journal of Political Science found that across 10,000 survey respondents, low-information voters who watched a lot of TV (still a dominant medium in 2007) were more swayed by whether a candidate was attractive, as rated by a separate sample of respondents.3 The effect was large for high-TV/low-knowledge voters: in gubernatorial races, “a 10 percentage point increase in the share of people who say the candidate looks more competent leads to about a 3.2 percentage point increase in vote share”. (The effect for senate candidates was higher.) Even a little bit of information was enough to tame this effect, suggesting that voters might not be totally superficial, but there was still an effect. The size of the hot candidate/low-information/high-TV voter effect is in the same league as that of, say, newspaper endorsements (back when those mattered). Another study of undergraduates (although, granted, this one of 2,400 students) similarly found that uninformed voters used political appearance as a heuristic.4
An Australian study similarly concludes that beauty matters substantially. Amy King and Andrew Leigh compared ratings of attractiveness for Australian candidates with vote turnouts in real elections, and find that candidates rated more attractive consistently scored about 1.5 to just over 2 points higher in vote share.5 Moreover, they found that the effect was higher in constituencies reported less interest (greater apathy) in the election outcomes—but even in engaged constituencies, there was still a notable effect. How big are we talking about? The authors estimate that one in ten races could have been decided differently if a median-attractive candidate had been replaced by a candidate at the 84th percentile. Furthermore, they find that these effects were greater for male than female candidates.
A study of candidates for the German Bundestag (legislature) similarly find that “visual appearance can make the difference”, although perceived attractiveness and competence may operate through different channels.6 Their effect estimate was in the same ballpark: moving from the lowest to highest relative attractiveness score was associated with an increase in vote share of about 2.4 percentage points. In line with the supposition that voters use faces as ways to judge factors like competence, another study finds facial attractiveness was important for candidates in Germany’s first-past-the-post elections but not its proportional representation tier (that is, when you vote for the person or when you vote for the party, attractiveness matters differently).7
Why Candidate Attractiveness Matters
There are a few mechanisms at work . First, moving from textual or audio media to visual ones greatly expands the range of content being delivered to an audience. With visual cues, audiences interact with a number of nonverbal and (one would think) insubstantial pieces of evidence, like poise and (yes) attractiveness. One rule of thumb in the political advertising world is that your TV spot should work with no sound at all. Along those lines, Daniel J. Benjamin and Jesse M. Shapiro found that showing 10-second silent video clips of gubernatorial debates to experimental participants led them to predict the winners of the races at a degree comparable to knowing incumbent status.8
Second, the fact that these results hold most strongly for the least-informed voters—and that they are replicated in a variety of settings—suggests that they are immediate heuristics similar to how people use judgments of attractiveness to arrive at personal evaluations in other scenarios. “‘Pretty’ is what it’s about,” sings the plain dancer in A Chorus Line, and research bears it out: there’s a substantial premium in lifetime wages to being attractive.9 It would actually be surprising if people who didn’t know much about politics didn’t make snap judgments that paralleled those in other fields. One recurring (but somewhat debated) takeaway concerns whether this is just a beauty contest or whether respondents also infer competence from faces.
Third, characteristics of the candidate and of the audience matter. Besides audiences’ exposure to media and the gender of the candidate (remember, the beauty-preference link is higher for male candidates!), liberal and conservative audiences may prefer different nonverbal cues, with right-leaning audiences preferring dominance but left-leaning audiences rejecting it.10 On the other hand, a large-scale study of Finnish candidates still demonstrates that even within parties attractiveness matters substantially.11
In practice, however, these all point in the same direction. There’s no alternate universe of voters who all consume information about politics from texts to draw from; we’ve got the electorate we’ve got, and that’s an electorate that is abandoning TV not for The Economist but for TikTok. Voters are not obviously becoming more informed over time. And candidates have limited ability to choose their parties at the point of running. Everything, in other words, points toward taking the ugly business of candidate hotness seriously.
Not a Hot Take: Take the Hot Ones
One intermediate implication is that campaigns need to take social media—particularly video—very seriously. (And this goes for political analysts, donors, etc.—just because you personally don’t use TikTok doesn’t make it irrelevant to politics.) A new study by Kevin Munger and Valerie Li finds that TikTok “edits” of Trump made him look more attractive and more badass—whereas Biden edits had no such impact.12 Spend enough time looking at politicians’ TikTok pages, as I did for my Congress course this past spring, and you’ll begin to note that for some offices this is second nature while for others just make cringe. Time to hire Zoomers, folks.
The broader implication for Democrats in particular in 2025 is that they need to think hard about candidate recruitment. Probably—and here’s the sentence in the piece that will get me in trouble—they need to search for more attractive candidates. To be clear, this doesn’t mean just going for Barbie and Ken; rather, it means given the choice between two candidates who are broadly (but not fully) matched on policy, fundraising prowess, and other traits, pick the hotter one. (Don’t know who’s more attractive? Get a panel of 100 average citizens to rate their images—it’ll take about 30 minutes.)
The Heat is On
I’m not denying that this is, frankly, a tough subject to talk about. There is evidence that attractiveness is correlated with higher-class occupations and backgrounds; in some regards, this is at least lite discrimination.13 But it needs to be discussed, ideally behind closed doors with no audio recordings. In 2024, eleven House races were decided by 2 percentage points or fewer in 2024. That’s in the zone where attractiveness makes a difference—although some of those races were already close because of candidate qualities. For the Senate, especially with open races, there’s more room to make these calls.
If the stakes are as high as everyone says, then every trait needs to be assessed cold-bloodedly. It’s an ugly business.
Druckman, James N. "The power of television images: The first Kennedy-Nixon debate revisited." The journal of politics 65.2 (2003): 559-571.
Druckman, James N., Lawrence R. Jacobs, and Eric Ostermeier. "Candidate strategies to prime issues and image." The Journal of Politics 66.4 (2004): 1180-1202.
Lenz, Gabriel S., and Chappell Lawson. "Looking the part: Television leads less informed citizens to vote based on candidates’ appearance." American Journal of Political Science 55.3 (2011): 574-589.
Stockemer, Daniel, and Rodrigo Praino. "Blinded by beauty? Physical attractiveness and candidate selection in the US House of Representatives." Social Science Quarterly 96.2 (2015): 430-443.
King, Amy, and Andrew Leigh. "Beautiful politicians." Kyklos 62.4 (2009): 579-593.
Jäckle, Sebastian, and Thomas Metz. "Beauty contest revisited: The effects of perceived attractiveness, competence, and likability on the electoral success of German MPs." Politics & Policy 45.4 (2017): 495-534.
Stockemer, D., & Praino, R. (2017). Physical attractiveness, voter heuristics and electoral systems: The role of candidate attractiveness under different institutional designs. The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 19(2), 336-352. https://doi.org/10.1177/1369148116687533 (Original work published 2017)
Daniel J Benjamin, Jesse M Shapiro; Thin-Slice Forecasts of Gubernatorial Elections. The Review of Economics and Statistics 2009; 91 (3): 523–536. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/rest.91.3.523
John Karl Scholz, Kamil Sicinski; Facial Attractiveness and Lifetime Earnings: Evidence from a Cohort Study. The Review of Economics and Statistics 2015; 97 (1): 14–28. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00435
Laustsen, L., & Petersen, M. B. (2015). Winning Faces Vary by Ideology: How Nonverbal Source Cues Influence Election and Communication Success in Politics. Political Communication, 33(2), 188–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2015.1050565
Berggren, Niclas, Henrik Jordahl, and Panu Poutvaara. "The looks of a winner: Beauty and electoral success." Journal of public economics 94.1-2 (2010): 8-15.
Munger, K., & Li, V. (2025). Thirst Traps and Quick Cuts: The Effects of TikTok “Edits” on Evaluations of Politicians. Social Media + Society, 11(2). https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051251329990 (Original work published 2025)
Bahamonde, Hector, and Outi Sarpila. "Physical appearance and elections: An inequality perspective." Political Psychology 45.3 (2024): 623-642.
Probably in response to this, I have a visceral aversion to a certain kind of candidate, whom I describe as "a man who looks good in a suit"