NH GOPer Won’t Back Down On ‘Ugly As Sin’ Screed: I Told You So

New Hampshire state Rep. Steve Vaillancourt (R) is standing by his argument that U.S. Rep Ann Kuster (D-NH) would lose re-election because she’s “ugly as sin.”

The lawmaker took heat for a blog post he wrote Friday arguing that Kuster would lose re-election to Republican challenger Marilinda Garcia, a Ted Cruz-backed state legislator who Vaillancourt described as “one of the most attractive women on the political scene anywhere.” Garcia later issued a statement saying those comments had “absolutely no place in the political discourse.”

In his blog post, Vaillancourt had cited an unknown study that found attractive candidates enjoy a significant advantage in the polls — seven to 10 points — over unattractive candidates, as long as both candidates are of the same sex and one candidate is not “so drop dead gorgeous as to intimidate those watching.” Vaillancourt pulled an “I told you so” on Tuesday and re-published the original source of that information on New Hampshire politics blog NH Insider.

“Here’s the original story, (which I had heard about on Red Eye on Fox News), which reports that more attractive people can have up to a ten percentage point advantage in certain elections,” he wrote. “As I originally reported, the seven percent number also appears in the story. Also note that, as I reported, it only works ‘when candidates are of the same sex’…so apprently [sic] I was hearing just fine at 3:10 a.m. last Tuesday night.’

As evidence, Vaillancourt copied over the text of a Washington Examiner article about a new University of Ottawa elections study that concluded “an extremely attractive candidate running against an extremely unattractive candidate can expect to obtain an electoral ‘beauty premium’ of more than 7 percent of the vote.”

He also took a shot at the media for picking up his sexist screed against Kuster.

“The media is spending too much time making up its own story to cover the real story, that a legitimate paper has reported that less attractive candidates can suffer as much as ten points,” he wrote.

But Alexander Todorov, a Princeton psychologist, told TPM that multiple studies and research groups have shown that competence actually trumps attractiveness for voters.

“The other important question is who are the people voting for the candidates. Appearance primarily affects voters who know next to nothing about politics,” he told TPM in an email. “That is, the advantage comes from this particular group of voters. An incumbent with a good record and voters familiar with his or her performance should have few reasons to worry.”