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I came across an article in The Bulwark recently arguing that Democrats need to run more “hot” candidates in order to win elections.
And to support this claim, they cited research suggesting that voters tend to trust more attractive people.
On the surface, it’s provocative. Maybe even a little uncomfortable. But not entirely surprising, because politics has never been immune to perception, presence, or the subtle ways we make snap judgments about who feels “electable.”
But here’s what was interesting – almost every example they gave was a man. And if it was a woman, there was a sense of hesitancy talking about it. And that’s where the argument starts to fall apart.
Because when a man is attractive and charismatic, we don’t question it—we reward it. We call him “relatable,” “dynamic,” “a strong candidate.” His presence becomes an asset. His confidence reads as leadership.
But when a woman shows up with that same presence — polished, confident, self-assured — suddenly the language shifts.
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She’s “too much.”
“Too influencer.”
“Not serious enough.”
Or my personal favorite: “I just don’t know if voters will respond to her.”
Let’s be honest about what’s really happening here. This isn’t about voter behavior as much as we want to pretend it is. This is about a double standard, one that is often reinforced within our own party.
I’ve seen it up close. I’ve experienced it personally. In South Carolina, for example, a male legislator can go on Facebook Live in a hot tub drinking wine, and no one bats an eye. But if a beautiful, young woman elected official posts a video with her friends having fun, she’s attacked for wanting to serve because she wants to “do it for the ‘gram.”
The more confidently and fully you show up as a woman, the more you embrace both your strength and your femininity, the more it unsettles people. Not voters, necessarily. But the gatekeepers. The insiders. The ones who believe they’re protecting “electability.”
And in doing so, they end up shrinking the very candidates we say we want.
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And there’s another layer we don’t talk about enough: we’ve quietly ceded the space of traditional beauty and femininity to conservatives. Somewhere along the way, there became an unspoken assumption that if you are progressive, you have to downplay those things — that embracing femininity, aesthetics, or beauty makes you less serious, less substantive, less credible.
So we minimize.
We tone it down.
We make ourselves more palatable.
We distance ourselves from anything that could be dismissed as superficial.
Meanwhile, conservatives have leaned all the way in, owning that space without apology, without contradiction, and without being asked to trade it off against competence.
And the result? We’ve created a false binary that never needed to exist in the first place.
Voters respond to presence. They respond to energy. They respond to authenticity and confidence. Those are not superficial qualities — they are signals. They tell people whether you can lead, whether you can command a room, whether you can carry the weight of the moment.
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RELATED | SC VOTES SEX SCANDAL
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We see it again and again.
So no, I don’t believe Democrats have a “hotness” problem.
What we have is a discomfort with letting women occupy space fully.
And until we stop sidelining femininity — until we stop treating it as something that undermines credibility instead of something that can coexist with strength, we will keep misdiagnosing the problem.
The path forward isn’t about recruiting “hotter” candidates.
It’s about dismantling the double standards and reclaiming the full spectrum of how women can show up.
Because voters aren’t confused by women who are both powerful and pretty – only we are.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR…
Dr. Aditi Bussells is rooted in South Carolina, she talks on community, public health, and politics through real life. A self-described Peak millennial balancing work, relationships, and motherhood in the South.
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8 comments
This actually touches upon a broader issue with the modern Democrat Party (and by modern, I mean post Clinton era). The hard core marxist left, which used to just be a small but highly motivated contingent of the party consisting of parts of coastal California (not even the whole state) and a smattering of elitist Northeasten states, gradually took over the leadership of the party and pushed out the more moderate but still generally patriotic heartland and southern Democrats (I would say former Senator Earnest Hollings would be a good example of that). Truman and Kennedy would have nothing to do with today’s Democrat party – hell, they probably would have been ousted if they didn’t leave voluntarily. Marxism is grounded, rooted in the neer-do-well malcontents, lazy losers, moral reprobates, and socially inept people who need to use the powers of the State to right their contrived, & concocted perceived wrongs, and take from those who strive to use the talents that God gave them to build and grow economically. Their ideology is completely one of weaponized victimhood; they compete to accumulate the most “cards” in this game they play. The view of attractive women is no different; it is a commodity that needs to be appropriated. The current wave of feminists (and I think we are on the 4th “wave” from what started in the 1920s) despise physically attractive married women who chose a good partner to create a family with – and no amount of voting Democrat or giving money to them for that woman is going to change that. Its a baked-in facet of the marxist-leninist- maoist dogma.
First, I do not think there is such a thing as “marxist-lennist-maoist dogma” and I am almost sure none of those self-identified latter-day feminists or otherwise-branded “hard-left” even read anything by Marx, Lenin, or Mao.
Next, PERSONALLY, I think the key to understanding latter-day “culture wars” in the so-called “West” is Charles Dickens’ greatest (in my opinion free from false humility) novel Great Expectations.
Forget for a while the romantic clap trap of Ms. Havisham grooming Estella to “break his heart.” And forget for a while whose, if anyone’s other than Ms. Havisham’s heart got actually broken.
The underlying plot is a convict going to Australia, enriching himself at the expense of the native people, and sending most of his money back to England for PIP to become educated as “a London gentleman.”
What does “a London gentleman” actually know or do? NOTHING other than some ancient philosophy and some partying.
And that is basically the ideal of the American “talking classes”: sitting on their butts and getting paid to merely talk, getting paid, that is, by money traceable back to the colonies.
Incidentally, and also stripping out the clap-trap romance of a dead woman’s daughter who loves one cousin but marries another, is the basic plot of Bronte’s Wuthering Heights: a strange found boy who grows up to disappear in the West Indies and returns with a fortune which he increases by enticing the established British “class” into gambling debts.
Or again, of the other Bronte sister’s Jane Ayre: a man forced to marry the crazed heiress of a fortune made in the West Indies after having squandered his own fortune on some French prostitutes and is rescued in his final destitution and blindness by the working-class Jane, who had herself suddenly come into the inheritance of a fortune made in America.
So, the hard right basically loves the hard left because without the other neither would have a subject to attack and get paid for attacking.
As for the REAL intellectual work of engineering infrastructure and treating patients, easy: just import foreign engineers and foreign doctors and get paid to argue how far to make them miserable.
And for the REAL work of growing food and transporting it to American tables, same answer: just import foreign agricultural workers and truck drivers and get paid to argue how far to make them miserable.
The REAL awakening will not be of the extreme left-talkers against the extreme right-talkers, or vice versa, but of those who do the REAL intellectual and physical work against those who want to continue getting paid for just talking about things.
Interesting ideas
Sure Gramps
Weirdo
“The hard core marxist left”
Yeah, sure. Thanks for the laugh buddy.
Women do not belong in politics. The men are terrible. Women are many times worse. Women govern more on emotion than thought or logic. Women take love of self and greed to aditional levels beyond what even men do. Repeal the 19th Amendment.
An excellent example of beauty of both parties… just turn on The View.