At the very beginning of this election campaign we drew attention to recent academic research claiming that good looking candidates tended to beat the not so good looking.

In the interests of furthering knowledge of this phenomenon we selected eight House of Representative seats at random and asked readers to indicate, from looking at pictures alone, the candidate they expected to win.

We had 760 people cast their vote and the results are given below.

PAGE — NSW

contest1

Candidate A: Janelle Saffin — ALP 30.6%
Candidate B: Kevin Hogan — Nationals 69.4%

GREY — SA

contest2

Candidate A: Rowan Ramsey — Liberal 53.3%
Candidate B: Tauto Sansbury — ALP 46.7%

HUGHES — NSW

contest3

Candidate A: Craig Kelly — Liberal 11.3%
Candidate B: Brent Thomas — ALP 88.7%

LONGMAN — QLD

contest4

Candidate A: Jon Sullivan — ALP 74.8%
Candidate B: Wyatt Roy — LNP 25.2%

MACQUARIE — NSW

contest5

Candidate A: Louise Markus — Liberal 78.4%
Candidate B: Susan Templeman — ALP 25.2%

McEWEN — VIC

contest6

Candidate A: Cameron Caine — Liberal 62.0%
Candidate B: Rob Mitchell — ALP 38.0%

WRIGHT — QLD

contest7

Candidate A: Andrew Ramsay — ALP 61.7%
Candidate B: Scott Buchholz — LNP 38.3%

FORDE — QLD

contest8

Candidate A: Bert Van Manen — LNP 12.8%
Candidate B: Brett Raguse — ALP 87.2%