Upon hearing Monday’s news that Donald Trump had selected Sen. J.D. Vance as his 2024 running mate, commentators and history buffs were quick to notice that the veep choice breaks the longstanding “beard barrier” on American presidential tickets.
Axios reports that Vance would be the first vice president with facial hair since President Herbert Hoover’s running mate Charles Curtis donned the mustache in 1933. Others noted Vance would be the first candidate on a presidential ticket with a full beard since Benjamin Harrison in 1892, although the 1916 Republican presidential nominee Charles Evans Hughes’ facial hair could arguably fall within the “full beard” range. Either way, that’s more than 100 years of clean-shaven statesmen, and women everywhere are rejoicing that the drought of dapperness is over.
While you may occasionally hear women demurring about the facial hair of their significant others, it’s objectively true that a good and well-kept — not patchy, adolescent, or overgrown — beard can transform and elevate a man’s attractiveness, and even his political prospects.
Consider the baby-faced Sen. Ted Cruz in 2016, who was a near-perfect GOP nominee on paper, but not in the mirror (he was often compared to a “blobfish” by internet goblins). After his primary loss to Trump, and his narrow victory over Beto O’Rourke in 2018, Cruz came back from a Thanksgiving recess with “a filled-out salt-and-pepper beard, giving his face a defined jawline and its first-ever hints of ruggedness and affability,” and the senator hasn’t looked back since. I can’t
