Make politicians ugly again Thirst-trapping won’t save the Dems

Seven years ago, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was in hot water. Specifically, the new congresswoman was in a bubble bath — and a steamy picture of her feet, tantalizingly poking out between a candle and a vape, ended up on Reddit. Capitalizing on the rising celebrity of this pretty, young Democrat firebrand, it was foot-fetish-site dynamite. But all was not as it seemed. What pranksters claimed to be a leak from her Instagram was in fact, as the priapic pros of the site WikiFeet (no, I’m not linking that) were quick to point out, not a picture of AOC at all. For the woman in the image had brachydactyly — short toes — and they did not correlate with the 15-plus images of the new congresswoman’s dawgs already collated on the site.

AOC’s feet, appallingly, then became a “thing”. It was one of the endless instances of Cortez being harried by men’s porn-flecked fascination with her; in perhaps the most egregious, a “provocateur” comedian (reliably the worst kind) heckled her outside the Capitol, calling her his “favorite big-booty Latina”. This should have been the point at which the electorate resolved never again to comment on the hotness or otherwise of politicians, so sordid was the spectacle of an elected official being reduced to a porn category. But it was not to be; thirst for bangable Left-wing contenders continues apace. Some Democrat strategists are even chalking up the failure of the Biden era to the administration’s physical haggardness and intimate a similarly fugly future. They point to a well of unsexiness for voters’ indifference towards the party: offputting “purity politics”, too much “academic-sounding language” and a lack of “thirst-traps on the ticket” are to blame. One former Biden staffer told The Bulwark that the attractiveness of those in government had become “a foundational brunch-time conversation” in DC; put simply, “It’s easier to elect hot people.” The staffer’s hot-ness was not recorded.

Fortunately, in this shallow climate, the party is blessed with a few good-looking rising stars: the campaign for New York’s 34-year-old mayor, focused intensely on his supposed attractiveness. Remember the Hot Girls for Zohran? And the superficiality of that campaign latched on to something ugly in the zeitgeist: the looksmaxxer Clavicular famously said he’d vote for Gavin Newsom over JD Vance — a very likely 2028 ballot — because the former “mogged” the “subhuman”, “obese” vice-president with a “recessed side profile”.

Vance responded in his own way to the looksmaxxer’s slight, telling a rally in Michigan last week that his wife Usha was 22 weeks pregnant and bragging that he was “persuasive” when she expressed doubts about carrying a fourth child. Like a latter-day Henry VIII, his prowess is predicated less on the shapeliness of his calves than on the headcount of his swelling brood. His brand of masculinity is not Mamdani’s — bashful, gentle, good-guy “allyship”; Vance conducts himself as the gruff patriarch (in guyliner), the straight-shooting sire with a codpiece to prove it. Sexual display, not pretty-boy looks, puts power over charm; fecundity — as with Pete Hegseth’s huge, blended family — is a manifesto in itself.

All this image-curation may seem like meaningless window-dressing, but physical impressions really do count. A 2010 MIT study found that participants in the US and India were able to guess, with exceptional accuracy, the outcomes of elections in Brazil and Mexico based only on a brief exposure to candidates’ photos; the groups tended to select the best-looking options and were correct that those options won between 68 and 75% of the time. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that female candidates were often deemed more attractive but were less likely to be elected than their correspondingly attractive male counterparts: fit men were taken more seriously than fit women. One economist speculated that voters preferred good-looking politicians because they “enjoy watching” them on television — “or think that they are better in social interactions”. The logic is this: in a crunch summit on nuclear disarmament, wouldn’t we rather send a young and vital charmer than a late-stage Yeltsin, red-faced and profusely sweaty?  Selecting beautiful leaders banks on their beauty translating to credibility; ugliness, conversely, must denote corruption and incompetence.

This was the reasoning that saw JFK snatch the 1960 presidential election — the first with televised debates — from a pallid Nixon who was sweating under studio lights, still recovering from an illness. The story, possibly apocryphal, goes that radio listeners thought Nixon “won” the face-offs, his experience and substance trouncing the young Democrat; TV audiences preferred this tanned, relaxed Kennedy who, unlike Nixon, was nothing if not telegenic. The first framemogging, and certainly not the last.

The problem is that the symmetricality of a person’s face is hardly a guarantee of competence in office. Obviously. If the Democrats were to take this guff seriously and stuff ballots with megababes to turn voters’ heads, they risk abandoning meaning and mission while the Republicans crack on with running the country. It seems a depressing endpoint of the populist race to the bottom that any party would deliberately parachute in smokeshows just to claw back some credibility — and a catastrophic overcorrection of the Biden-era gerontocracy. Fitness for office is nothing to do with fitness: this applies as much to mumbling seniles as it does to doe-eyed himbos. Voters may be libidinous, conducting their own subconscious sniff-tests based on whether they’d personally boot someone out of bed, but this should be seen as an unfortunate inevitability and not something for strategists to hack.

Surely there’s a case to be made for the “mids”: they seem far more trustworthy than a host of twinkly-eyed slickers. Nobody wants a Capitol that looks like a casting call for The Whale, but a return to boring old expertise — and the bookish, fuss-free types who tend to have it — is welcome. I accept this may be a British instinct, given that our Parliament more closely resembles an episode of  Coach Trip than Love Island; but America is an altogether different kettle of fish and worse off for it. Here virility is pushed to almost chaotic limits; the secretaries of war and health compete to do the most push-ups (see: the “Pete and Bobby Challenge”), a far cry from Thérèse Coffey, our erstwhile health secretary best remembered for an infamous ruddy-faced night-out snap in which she chomps on a cigar, clutching a glass of fizz. But does this mean that the clean-cut, gym-hitting politicians are “better”? I’d say both six-packs and smoking are irrelevant to the job in hand.

The problem is not that voters are shallow — this instinct is ancient and ineradicable — it is that we cannot have parties transforming into poor-man’s casting agents to fill ballots with would-be models out of desperation. If Democrats are indeed spending brunch speculating about which candidates must flash a bit of ankle to make up for their own political irrelevance, that is a sorry state of affairs indeed. With midterms around the corner, strategists will be schooling up hopefuls for the big gubernatorial races; the Republicans face real congressional jeopardy. Parties must not patronize voters, and demean their rising stars, by insisting that electoral success is all about square jaws and sexy toes. The downward spiral of populism has claimed many victims so far: complexity, nuance, moderation. Don’t let it take the uggos too.

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