Voters appear to penalize political candidates for their weight. A study of photographs of 3,612 candidates in the 2022 US Congressional elections finds that candidates seen as obese did worse at the polls, by a margin roughly half the size of the penalty for not having a college degree.
The study is by Claire Gothreau of Dartmouth College and Nicholas Haas of Aarhus University. It was published online as an accepted article in The Journal of Politics on June 16, 2026.
From photos to vote shares
The authors note that despite frequent talk about candidates’ “fitness for office,” little is known about how body weight relates to electoral performance.
To find out, they scraped photographs of 3,612 candidates who ran for Congress in 2022. An online sample of 669 people was paid incentives to guess each candidate’s demographic characteristics, including weight, from the images. The researchers then matched those perceptions with the candidates’ actual election results.
A penalty across parties and offices
The pattern was consistent with substantial weight-based discrimination. Obesity carried an electoral penalty roughly 50% as large as the penalty for lacking a college degree.
The penalty appeared across both parties, across office types, and for both male and female candidates. It was particularly binding for new entrants to politics.
The authors also report that the discrimination is “seemingly not only statistical in nature,” meaning voters do not appear to be using weight merely as a stand-in for other traits they care about.
A separate experiment in which participants chose between candidates based on their photos produced consistent results.
The authors call for further research into weight-based political discrimination. Their central estimate gives a sense of scale: in the eyes of voters, looking obese costs a candidate about half as much as having no college degree.
Study Details:
- Title: Weighty Politics: Weight-Based Discrimination in U.S. Elections
- Authors: Claire Gothreau, Nicholas Haas
- Journal: The Journal of Politics
- Publication Date: June 16, 2026
- DOI: 10.1086/742748