Yes, JD Vance’s Beard Matters. Here’s Why.

Beards are seemingly ubiquitous in pop culture and public life. From sports stars to country singers to Hollywood actors, facial hair has made a noticeable comeback in recent years — except in politics.

It’s been more than a century since a sitting president or vice president sported a beard, and nearly 80 years since a candidate for the White House had any facial hair whatsoever. Even in Congress, those with beards remain few and far between.

Enter Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance. The Ohio politician’s full beard is so novel on a presidential ticket that it’s been the subject of a disproportionate amount of the chatter surrounding his selection. Pundits had speculated as to whether it would ultimately be a deal-breaker for Donald Trump, whose well-known aversion to facial hair reportedly doomed some potential picks for his first-term Cabinet. Trump’s preferences mirror the long-standing societal stereotypes, which is part of why most pols have avoided facial hair in recent decades: For most of the 20th century in the United States, beards were seen as unprofessional and unhygienic. More recent research has shown that voters perceive facial hair as deeply masculine, which can come with both positive connotations (like competence) and negative ones (like aggression and less support of feminist issues).

By sporting a beard, Vance is on the cutting edge of a generational shift in facial hair styles — but he’s also in uncharted, potentially tricky territory. He, and by extension Trump’s campaign, are betting that voters will see his facial hair as a sign of Vance as the rugged everyman — “a young Abraham Lincoln,” as Trump said earlier this month — rather than giving off undertones of an untrustworthy aggressor.

“He’s either the tip of the iceberg or a very unusual aberration: It depends on whether people follow suit,” Christopher Oldstone-Moore, the author of Of Beards And Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair , told me. “I’ve always said that politics is going to be the top indicator of whether we’re going to be in a new beard era or not, whether we’re looking at the return of beards in a big way across the board.”

It hasn’t always been this way: The late 19th century and early 20th century saw a robust lineup of beards and facial hair in the White House. Lincoln ushered in a new era of beard-dom to the presidency in 1861, and nine of the next 11 presidents had either a beard or a mustache. The campaign trail was full of examples of copious facial hair: In 1916, the Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes had a tufty white mustache and goatee so impressive it earned him the nickname “the Bearded Iceberg.”

But the era of plentiful beards and impressive mustaches came to an end in the early 20th century with William H. Taft, the mustachioed 27th president who left office in 1913. After King Camp Gillette invented the safety razor with disposable blades in 1901, shaving became easier and more accessible, and with that shift came the idea that clean-shavenness was a mark of the modern professional man.

“There’s been a linkage between clean-shavenness and several important masculine qualities that were valued in the 20th century and even up to the present,” said Oldstone-Moore. “There was a strong association of shaving with regularity, efficiency, cooperation, reliability — all the kinds of things that corporations wanted.”

Those perceptions have lingered for decades: Rob Stutzman, a California-based Republican political consultant, said he’d been required to ditch his goatee when he got a job as a spokesperson for then-California Attorney General Dan Lungren in the late 1990s.

“In the politics I came up in, there was a sense that facial hair was less trustworthy,” Stutzman said. (It wasn’t an issue when he worked as then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s spokesperson a few years later, though: Schwarzenegger “didn’t care about my beard,” he said.)

Stutzman said he sees that stigma subsiding and would hardly advise a candidate to ditch his ‘stache or beard these days, as long as it’s well-groomed: “Maybe a heavy-kept beard or a long beard would still be regarded as odd if you’re a candidate,” he said.

Researchers at Oklahoma State University tested images of bearded candidates against similar-looking candidates that were clean-shaven, finding in a 2015 study that voters perceived those with beards as more masculine and more competent. But masculinity wasn’t necessarily a positive trait: Candidates with beards were also perceived as less supportive of feminist issues, and got less support from women voters.

Of those surveyed, 52 percent of men and 49 percent of women said they would vote for the candidate with facial hair — a figure that could make a difference in a close election. “Candidates — especially those needing to shore up support from female voters — should shave away all facial hair,” the researchers wrote at the time.

Projecting masculinity may have played a role in Vance’s beard, which is a relatively new look for him: He debuted it when he launched his Senate bid in 2022. After his rise to fame as the clean-shaven Hillbilly Elegy author, who criticized Trump and worked as a venture capitalist in California, sporting a beard served as a visual representation of his new political persona.

For Vance, who at 40 would become the third-youngest vice president in history if Trump wins, growing a beard is a way to ditch the baby-faced look and pitch himself as a rugged, independent commoner who doesn’t conform to the standards of the elite (a message that might resonate well among MAGA-style conservatives).

“I think you can make the case that there’s some populism to it,” said Stutzman, adding that a beard remains “somewhat inherently — if not anti-authority, at least anti-historical conventions.”

More than just serving as a tangible sign of Vance’s political transformation, political observers say it’s also a sign of the generational shift underway in politics. As more millennials enter elected office, beards are becoming more common and more accepted even in politics.

“There’s not a single millennial out there who would find the question of whether a politician has facial hair to be relevant,” said Republican consultant Brad Todd. Is the stigma against beards subsiding? “I think it’s completely gone,” he said, “due in large part to the Silent Generation moving out of politics.”

If Vance does break the so-called beard barrier and put facial hair back in the White House, it might not be the last aesthetic trend millennials normalize as they take on an increasingly influential role in politics. Todd’s prediction for the next one? “The next step is going to be, of course, very visible tattoos.”