Tall energy and tonight’s debate

Friends,

Trump called attention to the discrepancy between his height (reportedly 6-foot-3) and Kamala Harris’s (5-7½ in heels), insisting that no accommodation be made to appear closer in size at tonight’s debate.

“No boxes or artificial lifts will be allowed to stand on during my upcoming debate with Comrade Kamala Harris,” he wrote, adding that such accommodations would be “a form of cheating.” There’s no evidence Harris has sought such things.

Nicholas Rule, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto who researches social perception and cognition, said Harris’s shorter height will be irrelevant tonight because she exudes “Tall Energy,” which he defines as “the confidence that comes from being above average height.”

I am 4-feet-10. At my highest, I was 4-feet-11. I doubt I have “Tall Energy.” But if I were on the stage tonight with Donald Trump, I’d demolish him.

To be sure, when it comes to choosing leaders, our society is exceptionally heightist.

When I ran for the Democratic nomination for governor of Massachusetts in 2002, it seemed that the only attribute reporters wanted to cover was my height. Regardless of what I said in my speeches, the Boston Globe ran photos of me standing on boxes so I could see over the podium. The right-wing Boston Herald ran a headline on its front page charging “Short People Are Furious with Reich” because I had joked about my height on the campaign trail.

None of it helped me with that election. But I didn’t lose because of my height. I lost because I was a lousy campaigner.

Research shows that voters do prefer taller candidates. A paper published in 2013 by psychologists at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands analyzed the results of American presidential elections dating back to 1789. They found that taller candidates received more votes than shorter ones in roughly two-thirds of all elections. And the taller the candidates were relative to their opponents, the greater the average margin of their victory.

Among presidents who have sought a second term, winners have been two inches taller, on average, than losers. The authors conclude that height may explain as much as 15 percent of the variation in election outcomes.

It’s similar in the private sector. A survey of the heights of CEOs of Fortune 500 companies showed they were on average six feet tall —about 2.5 inches taller than the average American man.

Why are we so heightist? Probably because of some genetic trigger in our brain that told early humans they needed the protection of very big men. Other things being equal, large males are more to be feared, and they live longer. An impulse to defer to them, or prefer them as mates, makes evolutionary sense.

In Size Matters, Stephen S. Hall writes that in the 18th-century, Frederick William of Prussia paid huge sums to recruit giant soldiers from around the world, thereby giving tangible value to matters of inches, and revealing “the desirability of height for the first time in a large, post-medieval society.”

But hey, I’m okay with giant soldiers, big security guards, and massive CEOs. I don’t care if I lack “Tall Energy.” I’m fortunate to have grown up (or at least grown upward) in a society that values brains at least as much as brawn.

Kamala will win tonight, and she’ll go on to win the election in 55 days — not because of her “Tall Energy,” but because she’s smarter, tougher, and better in every way than her large, stupid, decrepit opponent.

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Please be sure to join Heather and me tonight for our debate watch-along, right here on this Substack starting at 8:45 pm ET / 5:45 pm PT, and all zones in between.