Last week when I was idly following links, I found my way to an obscure blog where I among the comments I read about how in presidential elections the taller candidate almost always wins. This is one of those silly canards that survives because people are more interested in repeating an entertaining factoid than checking if it's really true.

I've seen this factoid stated in various ways. The one I read last week had a peculiar formation: since Jimmy Carter, it said, the taller candidate has won all but two times.

This is demonstrably false, and you don't even need to know the height of anyone at all to demonstrate it: In 1824 John Quincy Adams was elected over Andrew Jackson; in 1828 Andrew Jackson was elected over John Quincy Adams. In 1836 Martin Van Buren was elected over William Henry Harrison; in 1840, William Henry Harrison was elected over Martin Van Buren. In 1888 Benjamin Harrison (William Henry's grandson) was elected over Grover Cleveland; in 1892 Grover Cleveland was elected over William Henry Harrison. Unless someone's height changed in the intervening four years, in each pair of elections, the shorter man must have won at least once, resulting in at least three times "before Carter" when the shorter candidate won.

I happen to know that Benjamin Harrison and Martin Van Buren are our second and third shortest presidents, the only ones besides Madison who are of a height we'd think of as significantly shorter than average. As for the other pair, I don't know who was taller, but I'd guess Jackson.

Grover Cleveland, on the other hand, was large in every dimension. I'd guess he was our second heaviest president after Taft. Winfield Scott, who lost to Franklin Pierce in 1852, might well have surpassed them both. He certainly would have been our tallest president, at 6'5" taller even than Lincoln, and in his later years he grew quite stout.

I can't help but ponder how the version of the factoid I read came about. It's especially strange that it specifies before Jimmy Carter. Although Carter was indeed an exception to the rule when he defeated the taller Gerald Ford, the immediately preceding election, in which Richard Nixon defeated the taller George McGovern, was also an exception. I can only imagine that someone formulated the factoid before 1972, then it got repeated in spite of that fact that Nixon-McGovern was an exception, and then some time after 1976 someone else noticed that Carter-Ford was an exception and so added the "before Carter" caveat.

There really was a period when the taller candidate won most of the time, starting after 1900, when relatively short William McKinley defeated relatively tall William Jennings Bryan for the second time. How many other exceptions there were after that depends on whom you ask -- I've seen conflicting height reports on several of the elections of the early 20th century (there's a list on Wikipedia which looks very suspicious to me) -- but it's pretty easy to imagine someone saying "since the turn of the century" and coming up with two exceptions.

For what it's worth, our current president is shorter than either of the Democrats he defeated. Of the three candidates for 2008, Obama is taller than either McCain or Clinton. I'm not sure which of the latter two is taller.

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