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By Amanda Castro
Associate News Editor
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A conservative commentator has offered an unusual diagnosis for Republicans’ bruising midterm losses, saying that the party needs better-looking candidates.
Peachy Keenan argued after the election that male Republican candidates should be more carefully vetted for physical attractiveness, pointing to facial symmetry, clear skin, build, and hair, and contending that most losing GOP candidates failed what she called the basic “looksmaxxer test.”
The argument may sound deliberately provocative, but the underlying premise is not entirely frivolous. A substantial body of political science research has found links between candidates’ appearances, perceptions of traits such as competence and electoral performance.
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Democrats emerged from the midterm elections with control of both chambers of Congress after victories in states and districts Republicans once considered secure, prompting an unusual post-election theory about one possible advantage some winners enjoyed: They looked the part.
Democrats have taken 54 Senate seats and are projected to take between 251 and 268 House seats, turning what might otherwise be dismissed as an internet joke about attractive candidates into a question arriving amid a genuine political realignment.
The consequences for Donald Trump are considerably more serious than aesthetics. Democrats will take control of the House and Senate in January, giving the party greater power to block legislation, scrutinize the administration and investigate the president during the second half of his term.
Republicans themselves have already been talking about looks, not least Trump, however. In the closing weeks of the campaign, the president repeatedly promoted Republican candidates partly by assessing their appearance, calling House candidate Ed Gallrein a “beautiful guy” who looked like “Central Casting,” describing Jon Husted as good-looking and scrutinizing his physique, and taking the opposite approach with Texas Republican Ken Paxton, saying he did not like the way the candidate looked.
The joke after Election Day, then, comes with an uncomfortable question for a Republican Party picking through a sweeping defeat: Does MAGA have a hotness problem?
Democrats’ Midterm Winners Put ‘Hot’ Politics Back in the Spotlight
Democrats’ success went far beyond a handful of photogenic candidates. They flipped Senate seats in Texas, Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Maine, North Carolina and South Carolina while retaining competitive seats including Georgia and Michigan. James Talarico defeated Ken Paxton in Texas, Sherrod Brown beat Jon Husted in Ohio, and Abdul El-Sayed won Michigan. Jon Ossoff comfortably retained his Georgia Senate seat against Republican Mike Collins.
More obvious explanations explain the result than anyone's jawline. CBS described Tuesday as a broad rebuke of congressional Republicans and Trump's agenda, while other election coverage pointed to the cost of living and the war with Iran among voters' major concerns. Yet the winners arrived after months of cultural chatter about a younger class of Democratic politicians whose physical presentation has become part of their political identity.
The phenomenon is not simply about conventional attractiveness. Youth, fitness, clothing and an ability to look natural in the relentless visual environment of social media can all contribute to the image a candidate projects. Sam Forstag, the 32-year-old Montana Democrat highlighted in *GQ'*s post-election coverage, became a particularly literal version of the phenomenon: a young candidate whose campaign wardrobe evoked Ralph Lauren almost as much as traditional congressional attire.
That aesthetic is part of a broader generational contrast surrounding politicians such as Ossoff, Talarico and El-Sayed. Calling any politician “hot” remains subjective. What is less subjective is that voters now consume an extraordinary amount of politics visually, through photographs, television and social media clips, and research suggests those impressions can affect how candidates are perceived.
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Trump Was Already Rating His Candidates’ Looks
If MAGA does have a “hotness problem,” Trump cannot be accused of failing to think about the issue.
Weeks before Republicans' defeat, the president was openly appraising candidates on the campaign trail. At a Kentucky rally, he praised Husted as a “perfect person, good-looking guy,” before recounting an examination of the Ohio senator's backside, shoulders, feet, hands and jawline. The episode was not isolated: Trump repeatedly revisited Husted's physique at campaign appearances.
Trump made appearance part of his sales pitch elsewhere. He praised Gallrein as looking as though he belonged in “Central casting,” while telling an audience that he did not particularly like Paxton's appearance. Trump also attacked Democrats on the same terrain, comparing Talarico with the MAD magazine character Alfred E. Neuman and disputing the apparently unwelcome proposition that Ossoff was handsome. Instead, he praised Collins, Ossoff's Republican opponent, as good-looking and “all man.”
The election produced a brutal punchline. Husted lost to Brown, Paxton lost to Talarico and Collins lost to Ossoff.
That does not demonstrate that attractiveness changed a single vote in those contests. But it does make the post-election “hotness” conversation harder to characterize as something dreamed up exclusively by Democrats or their admirers. Trump, whose pre-political career included ownership of the Miss Universe pageant and starring in The Apprentice, has long treated appearance as one measure of whether somebody fits a role. The Associated Press noted during the campaign that appearance has repeatedly served as either a compliment or a weapon in his political repertoire.
The ‘Looksmaxxing’ Theory Comes for Republicans
The idea became explicit after the Republican losses when Keenan argued on X that male Republican candidates should be screened more carefully for physical attractiveness, listing facial symmetry, skin, build and hair among the characteristics she thought the party should consider.
The post was deliberately provocative, adopting the vocabulary of “looksmaxxing,” an online subculture built around attempts to optimize physical attractiveness. But its underlying premise is strikingly close to what Democrats had been debating months earlier: What if candidate quality includes not only ideology, biography, and political skill, but the impressions voters form before a candidate has finished introducing himself?
Even the Georgia contest became fodder for a different kind of appearance analysis. Menswear writer Derek Guy used photographs of Ossoff and Collins to explain problems with the fit of men's trousers. His analysis of Ossoff's clothing became considerably more anatomically specific from there.
It is easy to laugh at that discourse. It is harder to argue that appearance has no place in American politics when candidates operate on TikTok, Instagram, television, and smartphones, where a still photograph or seconds-long clip can reach more people than an hour-long policy speech.
What Science Says About Attractive Political Candidates
A serious body of research backs up the unserious-sounding question.
A 2021 study by Lena Masch, Anna Gassner and Ulrich Rosar, published in Politics and the Life Sciences by Cambridge University Press, examined 1,779 candidates across 299 constituencies in Germany's 2017 federal election. Twenty-four coders rated candidate photographs for attractiveness without being told that the people pictured were politicians, while researchers separately analyzed facial expressions.
The researchers found a statistically significant association between physical attractiveness and candidates' direct vote shares even after accounting for other characteristics and displays of happiness. Smiling was itself positively associated with votes, and the researchers found some evidence that attractive candidates benefited particularly when smiling. Importantly, the authors cautioned that their observational study established correlations, not proof that attractiveness caused voters to choose a candidate.
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The study also drew an interesting parallel to the current MAGA debate. In its German sample, candidates from mainstream parties were rated, on average, as more attractive than candidates representing the populist Left and Alternative for Germany. The researchers offered several possible explanations, including differences in campaign professionalism and photography, self-selection into established parties, social status, and the possibility that anti-establishment candidates intentionally project a less conventional image. They did not establish which explanation was responsible.
That distinction matters for the MAGA question. A perceived attractiveness gap, if one exists in American politics, might not mean one party simply recruits better-looking humans. It could reflect styling, photography, age, clothes, physical fitness, branding and the broader visual message candidates choose to send.
Voters Can Judge a Candidate in a Tenth of a Second
Perhaps the most remarkable evidence comes from the 2007 study by Charles Ballew and Alexander Todorov at Princeton University, who tested whether people could anticipate election results simply by looking at candidates' faces.
Participants who did not recognize the candidates were shown photographs of winners and runners-up of the 2006 elections and asked which appeared more competent. Judgments after exposures as brief as 100 milliseconds were about as predictive as judgments made after longer viewing periods. Researchers found the judgments correctly predicted the winner in 72.4 percent of Senate races and 68.6 percent of gubernatorial races.
That is not the same thing as showing that the better-looking candidate wins. In fact, the work focused on perceived competence, rather than attractiveness alone. The significance is that voters can extract politically meaningful impressions from a face almost instantaneously, and those impressions correlate with real-world election outcomes.
The Cambridge research offers one possible bridge between the concepts. It describes attractiveness as having a “halo effect,” in which attractive people can be evaluated more favorably on unrelated characteristics. Candidate appearance can therefore work as an informational shortcut, particularly when voters have little other information available.
Politics may be about policy. Political perception starts much faster.
From Kennedy and Nixon to TikTok Politics
None of this began with Ossoff's jawline or Trump's assessment of Husted's anatomy.
The enduring story of the 1960 presidential debate between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon holds that television viewers favored the younger, camera-ready Kennedy, while radio listeners thought Nixon had performed better. The anecdote has become so deeply embedded in political lore that its tidiness can obscure a larger point: Television fundamentally expanded the importance of a politician's visual presentation.
Social media has intensified that dynamic. Candidates are no longer judged visually only during debates, campaign advertisements and evening-news appearances. Every rally can produce a viral clip. Every outfit can become a meme. Every photograph can be detached from the event that produced it and circulate to millions of people who know little about the candidate's platform.
That environment may make the distinction between “hot” and politically photogenic increasingly difficult to draw. What voters perceive as attractiveness could overlap with youth, health, confidence, competence, status or strength, precisely the characteristics researchers have tried to separate when studying candidate appearance. The study "Can a beautiful smile win the vote?" explicitly cautions that physical attractiveness is multidimensional and can interact with expressions and other visible traits.
Does MAGA Really Have a Hotness Problem?
No evidence shows Republicans lost Congress because their candidates were insufficiently attractive. Plenty of evidence shows, however, that they suffered a much broader political rejection. Democrats captured both congressional chambers; CBS projects the party at least 54 Senate seats, while major victories stretched from Talarico's Texas upset to Brown's win in Ohio. Those results cannot responsibly be reduced to cheekbones, tailoring or hair.
But “hotness” may be shorthand for something politically more consequential.
The research does not say voters reliably choose the most conventionally beautiful person. It suggests that appearance can supply rapid cues about competence, confidence and other desirable characteristics, while attractiveness itself has repeatedly been associated with electoral performance. In an era when candidates are encountered constantly through images and short videos, those instantaneous impressions have more opportunities than ever to form.
That leaves Republicans with a stranger version of the candidate-quality question as they recover from 2026. Trump spent part of the campaign insisting his candidates looked like winners. Voters decided otherwise.
Maybe MAGA's problem is not that it isn't hot enough. Maybe the more consequential problem is that a new generation of Democrats has learned how to look like the future, while Republicans have just been handed an election result telling them that a sizable portion of the electorate is ready for something different.
But Republicans searching for lessons from the midterms would be wise not to spend too long staring in the mirror. Attractive candidates may enjoy an advantage, but voters were also making judgments about affordability, war, immigration and Trump himself.
Elections are won on more than looks. Democrats’ victories came amid voter concerns over the cost of living, the administration’s policies and the direction of the country. Research may suggest appearance can shape first impressions, but no jawline can substitute for a political message voters actually want to support.
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