In less than a year, American voters will choose 48 governors, 435 members of the House of Representatives and 33 senators — and strategists are warning Democrats to look in the mirror. Literally.
The problem, many political consultants say, is that compared to Trump’s “central casting” cabinet and the younger-skewing GOP, the most prominent Democratic messengers might not be attractive, or young enough to capture the attention of 2026 voters.
Not long ago, whether a given party’s politicians were “hot” or not wasn’t much of a concern outside gossip columns or glossy magazine spreads, and Democrats were able to command the latter with ease. These days though, Trump calls the nation the ‘hottest anywhere’ as a normal course and relishes talking about how attractive people are as a push back to what he sees as woke indoctrination.
During the George W. Bush and Barack Obama years, and even through Trump’s first term, the party had the benefit of an influx of young (for politics) and telegenic faces, ranging from Obama himself — including wife Michelle and their daughters Sasha and Malia — bursting onto the scene during the 2004 presidential election. And fresh Trump-era Democratic faces during the 2018 and 2020 cycles such as then-South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg, New York Rep. Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez and Georgia senators Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock.
But as the attention economy has shifted from glossy print spreads to television, streaming and short-form vertical video, the visual has seemingly become far more important than the substance of any politician’s given message.
With some exceptions — think New York Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani and California Gov. Gavin Newsom — the increasingly visual nature of modern media and politics has been almost entirely to the GOP’s benefit.
It became increasingly noticeable during the government shutdown that was the longest-ever funding lapse in American history, with the Republican Party’s daily message carried through a series of near-daily press conferences by House Speaker Mike Johnson and Senate Majority Leader John Thune.
Both are clean-cut, trim, with full heads of hair. Johnson often appears younger than his 53 years, while Thune is routinely cited as one of the best-dressed (and best looking) men in Washington.
And within Trump’s two administrations, there are countless examples of the president himself referring to his appointees’ looks as a qualifier for their positions, often by citing them as being from “central casting.”
Shortly after he was sworn in for his first term in 2017, Trump used that exact description for his first secretary of defense, retired Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis.
Speaking at a post-inauguration lunch, he said to his newly minted Pentagon boss: "If I'm doing a movie, I'd pick you, Gen. Mattis."
That same year, he gave a similar compliment to his first vice president, Mike Pence, at a National Governors Association meeting.
Years before he’d fall out with Pence in dramatic fashion after losing the 2020 election, he called the ex-Indiana governor “a real talent, a real guy.”
“And he is central casting, do we agree? Central casting,” Trump said.
He’s used the same terminology for some of his second-term appointments, including “border czar” Tom Homan during a speech to the 2025 Conservative Political Action Conference in February in which he asked the crowd: "Is this guy central casting, though? Tom Homan. Is he central casting?"
By contrast, the Democratic opposition is providing few leading men or women — or even landing character-actor roles like Homan.
The top Democrat in the Senate, Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, is 74 years old, balding and stoop-shouldered. In recent years, he’s also begun to rely on unflattering reading glasses when making public statements, underscoring his advanced age. His number-two, Washington Sen. Patty Murray, is a year older still.
Things are slightly better in the House leadership, where Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Whip Katherine Clark and Conference Chair Pete Aguilar are slightly more dynamic. But the contrasts are still striking when watching both sets of leaders side-by-side with their GOP counterparts.
One Democratic strategist, who asked for anonymity to be candid about members of their own party, rendered their verdict in brutally honest terms.
“We look frumpy as hell and they look put together and authoritative,” the strategist said.
Another Democratic campaign professional who has worked with a number of prominent members in both chambers, conceded that there is a significant gap when it comes to the images of both party’s most prominent messengers.
“From a base marketing perspective, people are more likely to trust somebody with a symmetrical face, they're more likely to trust somebody with a good smile, they're more likely to trust somebody with good head hair, right, somebody with a well-kept beard. So those things are all legit,” he said.
He added that Trump and his administration are “obsessed with image and appearance” and said the president’s obsession does have some benefits when it comes to messaging, but he cautioned that the Trumpian “central casting” focus is “a mile wide and an inch deep.”
“They care more about Pete Hegseth being mildly attractive … than they do about whether or not he's actually good at doing his f***ing job,” he said.
Hegseth and other Trump cabinet members present themselves in a way that can be traced back to the same image-making factory that has permitted the GOP-aligned messaging machine to pump out a succession of clean-cut men and women who hew to an easily-identifiable and camera-ready aesthetic.
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Largely thanks to the influence of Fox News, it’s long been well-defined to the point of parody.
For women, it means sheath dresses in bright colors — with the occasional pantsuit tolerated but not exactly encouraged. Long hair, impeccably blown out.
For men, dark suits and bright color ties (usually red).
What was more or less an unofficial dress code became de rigeur in 2017 once Trump entered the White House.
Less than a month after his first term began, Axios reported that the then-45th president had very specific requirements for those working under him, with one source opining that Trump wanted the men in his administration “to have a certain look” including being “sharply dressed” with “a good physical demeanor, good stature, hair well groomed."
Another source said at the time that the president wanted the women working for him "to dress like women” — that means dresses, not suits, with hair kept long and well-maintained.
Trump’s preferences haven’t changed 10 months into his second term, either. The women in his administration (with few exceptions) wear dresses, the men stick to dark suits. And in the words of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, they’re fit — not fat.
Richard Hanania, a conservative writer who contributed to the anti-DEI portions of the Project 2025 blueprint for the second Trump administration but has since become a sharp critic of the president and his Make America Great Again movement, told The Independent there is already a body of existing academic research that shows Americans generally consider Republicans to be more attractive and suggested that part of the GOP’s advantage stems from how many of the most prominent women in the party are “more kind of overtly sexual in the way they dress and the way they act in a way that left-wingers are not.”
Hanania, who admitted to writing for number of white supremacist under a pseudonym in the early 2010s but has since renounced those views, also posited that the stylistic and aesthetic differences between Democratic and Republican women play into a stereotype that casts the Democratic Party as “the party of feminization, or kind of aggressive feminists” and suggested that the GOP’s emphasis on “traditional” looks for men and women could present “a pretty big problem” for Democrats in close elections.
“To the extent that we understand that human nature is a thing that operates on averages across the entire population, and to the extent that we believe that good looking people have an advantage and people think in terms of stereotypes and prototypes, it would be unusual to expect that this wouldn't rebound to the advantage of Republicans,” he said.
No Democratic consultant or strategist contacted by The Independent for this story would speak on the record, citing fears of professional consequences for speaking publicly about the physical appearance of prominent members of their own party. But a number of operatives suggested that the problem Democrats are facing can be addressed by attrition as some older members retire — or hang around too long — and are replaced by younger and more telegenic officeholders.
One consultant told The Independent that their party’s “hotness gap” is a “generational problem” that means “we end up putting a lot of, you know, older people on TV,” though he suggested that the problem is “getting better” because “the younger crop of Democrats are attractive” in comparison.
“We're stuck in a moment where Democrats need generational change at basically every level, like we do need new leaders that we can put out on TV. We need new surrogates we can put out on TV and on social media. We need new campaign strategists. We need new influencers. We need new everything,” he said.
Clare Considine, a former senior adviser to MAGA South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace, told The Independent that the Democratic operatives’ assessment is largely accurate and pointed to a calculation she’d done of the median age of the House members who spoke at last year’s Republican National Convention was 49.
Considine said she did not make a similar calculation for the House members who spoke at the Democratic convention a month later but she noted that it was most likely “far older” and suggested that part of Democrats’ problem is their party’s lack of term limits for committee chairs.
By contrast, she said the GOP’s insistence on forcing committee leaders to give up their posts after three terms (six years) means that to a greater extent the party “centers younger people.”
Like Hanania, she agreed that GOP women have recently tended toward a common “look” and attributed that imagery to the “southern influence” on GOP culture. She suggested that Democratic women “unburden” themselves from what she called “the internalized misogyny of imagining that you have to be frumpy to be serious.”
But Considine agreed that the GOP has an advantage in an age where people often watch television with the sound off or quickly scroll through vertical videos on TikTok for their news because the Republican aesthetic helps their candidates gain credibility with a public that has a short attention span.
“There's a reason that pro athletes have a game day fit and treat the tunnel like a runway, because when you look good and you feel good, you're ready to play and perform, and it's why we have a trifecta,” she said.
The Democratic strategist who said the party’s image problem is “getting better” also suggested that Republicans have similar issues and panned GOP figures such as Trump who “think the answer to all of their problems is to find a hot lawyer who can explain that Donald Trump is indicting people through the DOJ” on television and called the Trumpian preoccupation with “central casting” looks “very shallow.”
“None of it really covers up how f***ing ridiculous this administration is,” he said.
But another Republican media consultant who worked on Trump’s 2020 campaign, Giancarlo Sopo, told The Independent that Democrats need to find a way to embrace “shallowness” at some level if they want to win in today’s heavily-visual information environment.
“Any political party that dismisses beauty as ornamental does so at its own peril — You don’t have to like the execution, but President Trump intuitively understands that humans respond to aesthetics before argument,” he said.
Sopo cited the example of how the ideas put forth by President John F. Kennedy during the 1960 presidential campaign and afterwards “weren’t particularly novel” on their own but led to Kennedy’s victory and his administration’s popularity because “they felt new because his administration projected cultural renewal,” especially compared with the man he succeeded as president, Dwight Eisenhower.
“His more avuncular predecessor, by contrast, was far more consequential yet has been largely forgotten by the public,” he said.
“The lesson isn’t that substance doesn’t matter; it’s that without aesthetic resonance, it might fail to reach people at all.“
