How a politician looks in newspaper photos influences poll numbers

I was just rereading an article from about a year ago titled Is a Picture Worth 1,000 Polls? In it Virginia Postrel tells us that positive images of politicians precede good poll numbers.

Researchers showed volunteers numerous photos of the same person and had them pick the images that conveyed competence. Here's an excerpt:

Using this information, the researchers created a mathematical model mapping the relationship between the photos' syntactical attributes and their inferred intents. "One can say, for example," they write, "perception of competence arises from combination of facial displays (smile), gestures (hand wave, hand shake), and scene context (large-crowd)." With that information, they could give the computer a new photo of a politician to analyze, looking only at its syntactical attributes, and rank for its likely effect.

That's how they found the relation between news photos and poll results. They crawled news articles that mentioned Obama between January 2008 through September 2013 in the four sources -- two domestic and two British -- and collected about 50,000 photos of him. They then analyzed the photos for their syntactical attributes and the implied "favorable" effect and compared the patterns against aggregate poll results.

So a photo in the New York Times or Washington Post of a politician in the right pose can bump up their poll numbers. I'm sure we all remember the photos of Obama from the campaign seasons which showed him in the most favorable light. The one with the halo around his head probably really left an impression on the low information voter.

Fast forward to today, and let's see what images they're showing these days.

These are from the Washington Post. The one on the left shows a rather dejected looking Obama after a speech about the Iran deal. The one on the right shows a poster of Obama with a "$5.00 off any sweatshirt" sticker on it. Neither photo is particularly flattering. According to the theory, these photos may portend low poll numbers.

Contrast those with this one of Hillary Clinton. Oh my, how confident she looks. She was polling at about 51% unfavorable as of a couple of weeks ago. So maybe she's about to get a boost.

In any event, the look of a politician in a newspaper photo tells us a lot about what the newspaper people want us to think.