Harvard University political science Ryan Enos reports some important findings:

Mitt Romney is better looking than almost everyone reading this blog.  Back in 2008, I wrote about how Sarah Palin’s looks put her in the 95th percentile of politicians.  Romney has even Palin beat—he scores above the 99th percentile.

These results come from a study with my colleagues Matthew Atkinson and Seth Hill, in which we developed a method for obtaining the ratings of the facial competence of governor and Senate candidates from 1994 to 2006 by showing the images of these candidates to undergraduate students for 1 second, as pioneered by Alex Todorov.  In 2007, when we collected this data, we removed highly-recognizable candidates so that opinions about the candidates, other than their appearance, would not affect the ratings.  However, as with Palin, we are fortunate that Romney was a relative unknown at the time (at least to the undergraduates in California that we used), so we obtained a rating of his face.

And what a face it is!  We gathered the ratings of 728 candidates for Senate and Governors’ seats and Romney outscored all but four of them.  The only persons to win election that beat him are Russ Feingold (the best looking Democrat) and John Thune (the best looking overall).  Romney also appears to far outdo Paul Ryan, who came in in the 67th percentile of the 2004 House candidates (although the photos did not include abs).  (Also, that study only included white male candidates and the House was not measured on a common scale with Senators and Governors, but I’d feel pretty confident saying the 67th percentile of the House puts you well behind Romney).

We don’t have a rating of Obama because we deemed him too well-known, even in 2007, because his Senate race had attracted a lot of attention and there was already an excitement building around a possible White House bid.  However, we do have a score for Biden—and Romney has him beat badly.  Biden only comes in the 62nd percentile of Senate and governor candidates.

So, if the election were decided on looks, it would be no contest.  Fortunately for Obama and Biden, the election is not decided by looks.  As we point out in our paper associated with the study, most of the correlation between candidate appearance and election outcomes is probably spurious.  Very few voters are willing to cast their ballot for a candidate based on looks – we estimate that if a candidate moves from the 25th to the 75th percentile in attractiveness, this is likely to gain that candidate about 3.5 percentage points in vote among independent voters, which was not enough to decide the winner of even a single Senate race out of 99 that we examined.  Rather than good looks directly affecting voters’ decisions, it is likely that good looking people like Romney have a lot of success in life, obtain significant human capital—education, career success, education—and because of all they have to lose, they are strategic about which races they enter.

In a certain respect, Romney’s career both fits and is counter to this explanation, because he ran for Senate in 1994, against Ted Kennedy when he did not have a good chance of winning, but he did not run for Governor until 2002 where he used his good looks and the considerable capital he had earned from the Salt Lake City Olympics to run in a seat with no incumbent.  Of course, Romney may not have been able to be as strategic about when to run for President – and unfortunately for him, most voters seem to have made up their mind long ago—nevertheless, if a candidate’s appearance every can make a difference, it should make a difference for Mitt Romney and his face in the 99th percentile.

This year’s Republican Convention wins the prize for most conflicted message. Half the time, the convention was devoted to assuring those elusive swing voters—who needed assurance that Republicans really aren’t all angry white old men who hate women and minorities and would close your plant in a blink of the eye if they could make a nickel on the deal—that Republicans in general and Mitt Romney in particular were inclusive, caring, nurturing patriots. The other half of the time, it was devoted to bashing President Obama for his anti-American agenda, an agenda the Republican base has fabricated out of its own paranoia.

If you tune in to the networks' prime-time coverage of the Republican National Convention, you'll see the big speeches, learn what Karl Rove thinks about Mitt Romney's chances (prediction: Rove is bullish), and hear a lot of people extoll Romney's can-do spirit and well-groomed family. But there's another side to the gathering, beyond the silly hats, arguments over arcane convention rules, and general whoopin' and hollerin'. After extensive reporting, placing of hidden listening devices, and a greased palm or two, we have assembled this guide to the hidden RNC, to give you a window into the convention only the insiders know about.

Though the official story had it that Monday's events were cancelled due to the imminent arrival of Tropical Storm Isaac, we have it on good authority that the problem was actually the delayed arrival of Iggy. In every Republican convention since 1980, official activities cannot commence until a bull is sacrificed to Ploutos, the Greek god of wealth. This year's sacrifice—a noble creature bristling with muscle and the spirit of entrepreneurship—was delayed when the driver shepherding Iggy from his west Texas ranch fell ill after eating his 11th Chick-fil-A sandwich of the day. But by Monday evening, Iggy had been safely delivered, anointed with oil, and drained of his blood. After the party's super-secret Board of Overseers each imbibed from the chalice (making sure that Haley went last, since last time he damn near drank the whole thing), the convention could officially begin.

Since I write about politics for a living, my family and friends often ask me for my opinions about matters political, and in recent days these queries have taken on an edge — not quite panic, but let's call it worry. "Romney doesn't really have a chance, does he?" one person asked me yesterday with a quaver in her voice. Well, sure he has a chance, I replied. I'm still fairly confident that Obama is going to win in the end, but Romney does have a chance.

Which brings us to this week and the Republican convention. Right now, the race is essentially tied. If you look at averages of the polls, you see anything from an Obama advantage of about a point (that's what the pollster.com average has) to a Romney advantage of half a point (that's what the TPM average has). On the other hand, everybody sees a substantial advantage for Obama in the electoral college. But this is a good time for liberals to prepare themselves for something: at the end of this week, Mitt Romney is going to be ahead in most every poll. Don't panic.

For most of the campaign, the biggest booster of former President Bill Clinton was Mitt Romney. After a year of pandering to the right wing of the Republican Party, Romney needed something that would signal moderation and tap into the broad frustration with President Obama’s administration. Popular at home and abroad, Clinton reminded Americans of better times. And despite the fact that Obama drew heavily from the Clinton administration, Romney used the poor economic conditions to argue that Obama had strayed from the Clinton path.

Republicans up for election in 2012—from Mitt Romney down to the most junior member of Congress—don't want to talk about social issues. Their success is predicated upon talking about the economy—and then talking about the economy some more—and making arguments about why they deserve a shot at trying to jump-start the job market. But when a member of Congress says that in instances of "legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down," the narrative is bound to veer wildly off-course.