5 minutes reading time
There's something I've been sitting on since I wrote about Vijay forming TVK, something that makes the whole situation feel even more hopeless than it already did.
Researchers took photographs of candidates in elections — just photos, nothing else. Showed them to people who had no information about these candidates. No party affiliation, no policy position, no track record, nothing. Just faces. Asked people which candidate they felt more comfortable with. And the person people picked — the comfortable-looking one — turned out to be the actual winner more often than not. Significantly more often. This isn't one fringe study; it's been replicated. Alexander Todorov at Princeton did this with US Senate races and found that quick competence judgments from face photographs alone predicted about 70% of race outcomes.
Seventy percent.
From a photograph.
The same bias shows up in courts. Juries convict attractive defendants less often. When they do convict them, the sentences are lighter. And before you say "well, juries are ordinary people with biases" — so are the judges. The supposedly learned, trained, law-degree-having judges also hand down lighter sentences to conventionally attractive defendants. I read about this in The Righteous Mind — I'd forgotten the book name for a second, it came back to me — and I thought, okay, this is probably overstated. So I went and checked. It's not overstated. It's documented. It's depressing.
We like to think justice is blind. Turns out she's just squinting.
I started thinking about the photo study in the context of Vijay, and then I got a headache.
The guy is objectively attractive by any conventional standard. He's been on screen for three decades. Women call him Anna but the way they say it is not how you say "brother." You know what I mean. Men do it too — this weird parasocial devotion where they'll say things like "I'll be his wife if needed," which is its own strange thing I don't want to unpack right now. The point is: he's the most familiar attractive face in Tamil Nadu. If a study found that strangers pick the comfortable-looking candidate and that person wins, what happens when everyone already knows the face, already has warm feelings attached to it, already associates it with twenty-five years of likable characters?
I was going to say that this gives him a massive electoral advantage. But I already said that in March, approximately. The looks thing just makes it worse. More structural. Less about whether he deserves to win and more about whether the human brain is even capable of evaluating him fairly at this point.
There's a counterexample I almost used here — Nallakannu versus CP Radhakrishnan, 1998 or somewhere around there — but I stopped myself because it immediately falls apart. That election had other factors running through it that were much bigger than any photo study: there was the Coimbatore bomb blast, there was the DMK-BJP alliance, there was the whole national wave thing. Picking that specific race to illustrate the looks-bias point would be intellectually dishonest and I caught myself doing it. Sorry. I'm leaving the almost-example in to show you the kind of motivated reasoning I have to actively stop myself from doing.
Most people I've seen commenting on TVK say he'll win maybe ten seats if lucky. No credible MLAs in the party. No organisational depth. No established ground machinery. All of that is probably true.
But it doesn't comfort me the way it should.
The photo-study logic doesn't require winning a majority. It just requires pulling enough votes from the right places to matter, to shift things, to open the door for the next election where he has a little more credibility. A party that wins eight seats in 2026 is a party with a foothold. A party with a foothold and the most recognisable face in the state is not going away.
And then you add the looks-bias on top of the familiarity, on top of the depoliticisation, on top of the fan infrastructure — and what you're looking at is a democratic process that at multiple levels is not actually doing what democratic theory says it should be doing.
Jonathan Haidt's book — The Righteous Mind — makes the argument that humans rationalise decisions they've already made emotionally rather than reason their way to conclusions. The moral intuition comes first, the reasoning follows to justify it. Which means all the policy arguments, all the "what has he said about caste" and "what's his position on federalism," all of that — that happens after the gut has already decided. And the gut, in Tamil Nadu in 2026, is going to see a face it has been warm about for twenty-five years.
I don't know how you run a campaign against that. I'm not sure it's possible to run a campaign against that. You can have a better manifesto. You can have deeper organisational roots and a stronger track record and more credible candidates.
You'd still be running against Vijay Anna.
And Vijay Anna is good-looking.