Poor Elaine Marshall

So, last week I had a conversation with N&O ace political reporter Rob Christensen about the NC Senate race.  Short version– things look pretty hopeless for Democratic challenger Elaine Marshall:

Steven Greene, a political science professor at N.C. State University, said the race appears to be Burr’s to lose.

“With Burr’s kind of resources,” Greene said, “with what is clearly a good Republican year; to expect a not particularly well-known Democratic challenger to be able to come back, there is nothing I know in politics that would suggest that she could pull it off.”

I think I also said something about her trailing woefully in money.  To add insult to injury, here’s some recent findings on candidate attractiveness.  Via the Monkey Cage:

A new article in World Politics by Chappell Lawson, Gabriel Lenz, Andy Baker, and Michael Myers provides new and innovative evidence on the importance of looks in running for office (ungated version here). In a very clever research design, the authors asked Americans and Indians to evaluate the attractiveness of Mexican and Brazilian candidates for office. They not only found that Americans and Indians had pretty similar ideas about who was more attractive but also that their judgments predicted the outcomes of Mexican and Brazilian elections surprisingly well.

Burr, with his classic politician good looks, clearly has Marshall here as well: