Hillary Clinton is 5-foot-5 or 5-foot-4, depending on which report you look at.
Donald Trump is 6-foot-3, according to his doctor’s note.
That 9- or 10-inch difference is pretty massive — it's the largest between two major party candidates in the televised debate era.
This matters because research shows we have an implicit bias toward tall people being leaders. Sure, if you look at every presidential election in US history, height isn’t a definitive factor. But a study from 2012 found that height has mattered in more recent elections — perhaps because television allowed voters to more closely observe candidates’ physical stature. And there are studies that show people envision leaders being taller, and others that suggest our culture favors taller people.
But videos and photos can make it hard to tell how tall someone really is. So we created an interactive that lets you stand right next to every person who won a presidential election, as well as Trump and Clinton, to see how you measure up.
(The data was gathered from the Washington Post, New York Times, WhiteHouse.gov, ABC News, Presidenstory.com, and The American Pageant.)
As I created this interactive, one thing I couldn’t help but remember was that Clinton is the first woman from a major party to run for president. There is literally a line in my code that had to change the default styling of a president, specified to Clinton:
if (president_name == "Hillary Clinton") { personContainer.addClass("woman");} It was another reminder that it’s not Clinton’s height that is the largest implicit bias she is up against. It’s that being a woman means she has to be more qualified than a man to win an election.
