FEMINIST FORUM Sarah Palin, A Nation Object(ifie)s: The Role of Appearance Focus in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election Nathan A. Heflick & Jamie L. Goldenberg Published online: 24 December 2010 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2010 Abstract In 2008, Republican John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, lost the U.S. presidential election to Barack Obama and his vice presidential candidate, Joe Biden. During the campaign, Palin’s physical appearance, including her reported $150,000 makeover, received extensive media coverage. But, could the focus on her appearance have impacted the outcome of the election? Several lines of laboratory research suggest that this focus may have been detrimental to the Republican ticket because 1) it likely undermined perceptions of Palin’s competence, warmth and morality, and 2) it may have increased Palin’s focus on her own appearance, which, consistent with research on self-objectification, likely impaired the compe- tency of her actual performance. Voting research supports the importance of candidates’ perceived competence and character. Thus, while acknowledging the diverse influen- ces on an election’s outcome, a strong empirical case can be made that people objected to Sarah Palin (and therefore, John McCain), in part, because she was objectified. In contrast, there is no evidence to suggest that men suffer these same consequences when others, or they themselves, focus on their appearance. Therefore, it is not likely that the Democratic Obama-Biden ticket was hurt by these same factors. Keywords Sarah Palin . Objectification . Dehumanization . Election results Introduction That women are evaluated on the basis of their appearance more often than men has long been recognized by researchers (e.g., Berger 1962; Mulvey 1975). The Repub- lican vice presidential candidate for the 2008 U.S. presidential election, Sarah Palin, was no exception. Palin’s physical appearance, including her alleged $150,000 make- over (Isikoff and Smalley 2008), became somewhat of a national obsession prior to the election. During the campaign, it was not uncommon for the media to reference her appearance. For example, Time Magazine labeled her a “sex symbol” and reported that the words “photos” and “beauty pageant” were the 2nd and 3rd most popular internet search terms used in conjunction with her name (Tancer 2008). A clip of her wearing a swimsuit during a beauty pageant received well over a million views on the video website YouTube (www.youtube.com 2008, see Heflick and Goldenberg 2009). Conservative pundit Rush Limbaugh called her a “babe” (Dowd 2008) and Demo- cratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden quipped that the differences between he and Sarah Palin is that “she is good- looking” (Marquardt 2008). She and John McCain eventu- ally lost by a substantial margin (www.cnn.com 2008a). In exit polling, 60% percent of Americans deemed her unqualified to be Vice President (www.cnn.com 2008b), and of those, only 16% voted for the McCain-Palin ticket (www.cnn.com 2008b) suggesting that Palin was a factor in the Republican defeat. But did the focus on Palin’s appearance play a role? In this paper, we draw on several areas of social psychological research and voting research to argue that the heavy national focus on Sarah Palin’s appearance hurt the Republican ticket. In short, we suggest that it led people to perceive Palin as less competent, warm and moral N. A. Heflick (*) : J. L. Goldenberg University of South Florida, Tampa, FL, USA e-mail: nheflick@mail.usf.edu Sex Roles (2011) 65:149–155 DOI 10.1007/s11199-010-9901-4