Justin’s Trudeau’s hair might be the best weapon in the political business, just slightly ahead of Donald Trump’s golden locks.

After all it has made headlines in the past two years and signified Trudeau’s trajectory from Member of Parliament to leader of the Liberal Party.

“Justin Trudeau: Great hair but no credentials,” read an October 05, 2012, segment on the Toronto Sun website.

“Hair apparent Justin Trudeau changes look in leadership quest,” read a March 11, 2013, article by Canadian Press.

“Hair apparent: Is the son of a prime minister ready to take over the top job?” wrote The Economist on October 3, 2015.

Apart from the article by CP, which was a serious discussion about Trudeau’s hairstyle changes quoting an image consultant, the other two examples were more analytical discussions about Trudeau’s political abilities. The headlines, though, were all about the hair.

If the journalistic attention to Trudeau’s looks is to be taken seriously, it would seem that that We The Voters really care about this stuff, and maybe we do because everyone can’t help but talk about it: his youth, his looks, his style.

At one instance, during her summary of the election campaign on CBC’s The National, Wendy Mesley said, “Justin Trudeau was talking about youth, and not just his own.” In a Maclean’s piece on Trudeau’s tougher image in debates, Jaime Weinman uses his hair to depict the new image akin to the CP article cited above:

“Above all, there’s the hair. When he became the leader of the floundering Liberal party two years ago, his hair was longer, sometimes frizzier, always giving the illusion that he was too cool to cut it. Now he’s got shorter, slicker hair to go with his tougher manner.”

This image-centric attention towards a political leader is, unfortunately, not uncommon. Hilary Clinton’s pantsuits, Tom Mulcair’s beard, Barack Obama’s ear-to-ear grin, Rob Ford’s ‘crack-confession’ tie, Chris Christie’s weight. The style and image of political leaders becomes the most memorable thing of election coverage because of its visual nature.

Accordingly, there is an evident feedback loop where one comment on a politician’s hair leads to another, which leads to another and so forth. First, The Huffington Post publishes a photo gallery of the evolution of Trudeau’s hair. Then, the Conservative Party puts out a TV ad stating that Trudeau is “just not ready,” but “nice hair, though.” Toronto Sun puts together a list of the highlights of Canadian prime ministerial hairstyles in response to the ad, which is aptly titled “A nice ‘do isn’t a don’t to become Prime Minister.” Margaret Atwood then responds to all of this in an opinion column for the National Post: “Some are born with hair, some achieve hair, and some have hair thrust upon them through laws and customs.” Then, I write this blog post.

In all these examples, there is no discussion of Justin Trudeau’s politics, his views on policy or his plans for government. It’s all about the ‘do.

It’s absurd that hair could be such a big issue. It’s more absurd that election coverage almost presents Trudeau more as a young man with a great head of hair than as a leader with a pro-middle class platform for instance.

Yet, hair matters. We want a leader with a great head of hair over a politically capable mind. And when out of the three leaders on the stage, one looks like Justin Trudeau, it’s hard not to write about it, even if perhaps we shouldn’t.

Need something to spice up your house tonight? Try an old election poster!

Credit to Josh O’Kane for the snap.

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On October 17, The Globe and Mail published an editorial announcing their endorsement for Toronto’s mayoral race: “John Tory is Toronto’s best bet.” Torontoist wants citizens to vote for Olivia Chow and the Toronto Star will release their endorsement this week.

These endorsements may be a big deal for candidates. But beyond politician’s personal promotion, it’s difficult to tell how much they matter to voters. Carleton University professor Dwayne Winseck showed editorial endorsements were out of step with public opinion in the 2011 federal election. In a 2007 editorial, The Hamilton Spectator admitted its track record of picking winners wasn’t good.

As the editors at the Winnipeg Free Press point out, these endorsements may be more about the editorial board’s ego. This year, the Press is endorsing only the act of voting  in Winnipeg’s municipal election. The Guelph Mercury is also sitting out. Managing editor Phil Andrews writes that, while he supports the tradition, publishing an endorsement could be counter-productive from a business perspective.

There could be multiple reasons for this. Bloomberg Businessweek notes that as voters become increasingly accustomed to hyper-partisan media, the idea that readers would trust an editorial board to come to a balanced, authoritative conclusion about a candidate’s record can seem like a stretch. According to the Pew Research Journalism Project, voters are getting much of their news about candidates from the campaigns themselves rather than journalists. For the most part, endorsements are also predictable. You can disregard this piece if the Star gives two thumbs up to Doug Ford.

A voter may well be able to make a decision by reading competing endorsements. It certainly is convenient, and many major publications still publish them. The Star’s public editor, Kathy English, says that by telling citizens who the paper considers the best candidate, the Star is living up to its democratic responsibility to both foster public debate and take a clear stand on issues that matter to citizens of the community. The posts are popular, with the Globe’s endorsement garnering 316 comments to date. But they may not be more than an affirmation for dedicated readers and a chance to spew hate for critics.

Reporting public opinion polls is a firmly entrenched element of election campaign coverage. But whether polls influence election results is the subject of a continuing debate.

Alan Frizell, codirector of the Carleton School of Journalism poll, told The Toronto Star that after the 1980 federal election the school did a poll asking people why they voted as they did. Only four percent of the respondents admitted they were directly influenced by polls, but a further 68 percent said they believed polls might have subconsciously affected their decision.

Some critics argue that news agencies should be prohibited from publishing poll results during elections because the media tend to overemphasize the leading candidate, creating the so-called bandwagon effect. According to proponents of this view, undecided voters get caught up in the enthusiasm surrounding the poll leader and vote for that candidate because he or she seems assured of success.

When addressing the Canadian Public Relations Society in Ottawa last fall, Allan Gregg, president of Decima Research Ltd., dismissed this idea: “Historically that doesn’t hold. Only political barbarians would switch votes to go along with a pack. But polls have an indirect impact in that the notion of who is going to win a campaign structures media coverage.”

Critics of extensive reporting of polls also argue that when the media concentrates on poll results, not enough attention is paid to the important issues of a campaign and how effectively a potential leader can deal with them. Former industry minister Sinclair Stevens, an opponent of the use of polls in election coverage, says, “I think they are not necessary. It’s more important that people assess the issues and come to their own conclusions on the relative strengths and weaknesses of a leader.”

Geoffrey Stevens, managing editor of The Globe and Mail, doesn’t believe polls have a direct effect on voters, but he does feel they can lead to the underdog syndrome, whereby votes swing to candidates who do badly. Stevens believes John Turner’s poor standing in the polls last summer helped him pull off a victory in his Vancouver-Quadra riding. When it appeared that Turner might not even win in his own riding, some voters felt they should help Turner out, says Stevens.

Toronto Star national editor Ian Urquhart also doesn’t believe polls directly affect voters but thinks they can demoralize workers in the party that isn’t doing well, who consequently may not conduct as strong a campaign as they might were they feeling more confident. “So in that way polls indirectly influence the election,”

says Urquhart. He adds that last summer there was “such a proliferation of polls, to the point where people would have been confused. Television stations indiscriminately led off newscasts with reports of the latest poll, no matter who did them.”

To help its readers make sense of the varying results of the different poll takers last summer, Urquhart says the Star used the most recent Gallup poll on the front page and other polls on the inside pages: “By putting the Gallup poll on the front page, we’re signalling to our readers that the Starconsiders that poll the most valid.”

As for polls other than Gallup, such as those done by journalism students at Carleton, CROP (Centre de recherches sur l’opinion publique) and market researchers, Urquhart says the Star prints them because “they are part of the public record. If we didn’t carry them in the paper, readers would start to ask some very real questions about why they weren’t there.”

Joe Fletcher, a political scientist at the University of Toronto’s downtown campus, says although a lot of people feel opinion polls influence some voters, “no one has ever been clever enough to prove it.” He says comprehensive and sophisticated studies would have to be done to prove conclusively that such an influence does or does not exist. Fletcher suggests that those conducting such studies would have to carefully determine what variables have an impact on voters, because any influence would be very subtle. In addition, he believes a control group, completely isolated from news reports on campaigns and the results of polls, would also have to be studied. “It’s a very sticky methodological problem,” he says.

Although there is no concrete proof that polls influence voters, we must consider the possibility that they do because so many people suspect that such surveys exercise at least some indirect influence. It’s time the media started reporting poll results with more discretion. To predict an election winner based on campaign polls, as the media so often do, is nothing less than irresponsible.