Despite being a card-carrying member of the International Order of Confirmed Homosexuals, I have spent quite a lot of time lately thinking about Abdul El-Sayed’s biceps. I mean, have you seen them? The progressive Michigan senate nominee is jacked and he knows it. He almost always wears a tight black T-shirt to show off his muscles and incorporates a lot of fitness content in his campaign.
I’m not the only one who has noticed El-Sayed’s prominent muscles. They have had a lot of coverage, and are seen as part of a wider attempt to rebrand the Democratic party. Which, I don’t need to tell you, has a serious image problem; a poll in March found that the party is looked on even less favourably than the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. So, to make it look less like a party that is full of out-of-touch technocrats who sound as if they are reading from a 500-page PowerPoint presentation every time they try to explain anything, Democrats seem to be trying to up the sex appeal.
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“Democrats enter their thirst trap era,” News website Axios recently declared, summing up the phenomenon. The piece observed that the Democrats’ main TikTok page has given “the thirst trap treatment” to big names including El-Sayed, Zohran Mamdani and senator Jon Ossoff (“nicknamed ‘Senator My Boo’ by internet fans”), by posting flirty photos and videos. Axios quotes a political analyst who explains that while female Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have had their share of screen time, the Dems’ TikTok page has made a “very intentional choice to feature the most attractive male members”.
Fox News would appear to reluctantly agree with the assessment that Democrats are leaning into good looks to win the midterms. “El-Sayed is out in these tight T-shirts,” Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt said in a discussion last week. “AOC with her pretty smile. She’s beautiful. She’s got the red lipstick. You have Mamdani, always smiling … It doesn’t make their philosophy any less dangerous, right?… even with a tight T-shirt, it’s still socialism and it fails.”
Over on CNN there was a little more jubilation about the Democrats’ vibe shift. “Dems are hot again,” strategist Yemisi Egbewole proclaimed. “They’re coming out of the closet as hot people and I’m so excited.” Egbewole added that it wasn’t just about physical attractiveness: “I think they’re learning from Trump. Entertainment really sells.”
Sex sells too: it’s well established that voters around the world prefer good-looking candidates. But, while we may all be shallow deep down, some of us are shallower than others. A 2016 study found that rightwing politicians in Europe, the US and Australia tended to be more attractive than their progressive counterparts. That’s partly because “low-information” conservative voters are particularly prone to choosing attractive candidates. “In low-information city elections, a beauty increase of one standard deviation attracts about 20% more votes for the average candidate on the right and about 8% more votes for the average candidate on the left,” an analysis of the study by the Washington Post noted. Which raises the question: if looks really are so important to low-information rightwing voters, how did we end up with Donald Trump as president? (Woke 1.0 is over, haven’t you heard? It’s OK to say things like this now.)
Social media may have brought a new visual element to politics, but the most famous anecdote about how looks can sway an election is almost 70 years old. In September 1960, 70 million Americans watched Richard Nixon debate John F Kennedy in the first nationally televised debate between presidential candidates. Nixon had been the favourite going in but he had just been in hospital for a couple of weeks and looked terrible. JFK, on the other hand, was tanned and rested and had good stage makeup.
You can quibble with the conventional wisdom that Nixon lost that election on looks, but it certainly played a part. In his memoir, Nixon wrote: “What hurt me the most in the first debate was not the substance of the encounter between Kennedy and me, but the disadvantageous contrast in our appearances. After the program ended, callers, including my mother, wanted to know if anything was wrong, because I did not look well.”
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In short: if thirst traps are what it takes to get the US on a better path, then so be it. Jacked candidates in tight T-shirts may seem like a cheap trick, but even Nixon’s mother would agree that it’s a sound political strategy.
Arwa Mahdawi is a Guardian columnist
