A question of bodega orders was posed to New York City’s mayoral candidates during an October 2025 debate, placing their preferred sandwich order alongside questions about how they planned to address affordability and education in the country’s most populated city. The sandwich question may have been used for levity, but it belongs to a larger journalistic habit of asking politicians to prove that they understand the people whose wages, health care and working conditions will be shaped by public policy.
Political journalism repeatedly treats markers of relatability as clues to whether a candidate is collectivized as of the people, even if those details reveal little about whose interests that candidate will protect. Reporters should stop converting ordinary habits into political character tests because manufactured familiarity gives politicians an easy way to appear representative without having to prove representation through policy.
Food makes the problem easy to see because campaigns already understand and use its symbolic value. During the 2024 presidential campaign, Donald Trump staged a stop at a Pennsylvania McDonald’s where he served fries through the drive-through window, in which coverage emphasized the performance as part of a larger argument over working-class identity.
Reuters also documented the older campaign tradition of Barack Obama visiting diners and eating food while commentators discussed whether those choices could strengthen his “regular-guy” image. The meal is rarely just a meal once journalists treat consumption as proof of public belonging.
What candidates eat is only one part of a larger effort to make political power feel legible on a personal level. Research on mediated political personalization describes a shift in which the individual politicians become more central to political coverage and their characteristics gain attention alongside public roles. Candidate coverage regularly foregrounds hobbies and family life as windows into politicians’ personalities, while music choices are signals to insincerely inhabit communities that candidates hope to represent. Once framed as politically meaningful, a personal detail can feel revealing even when it has been supplied by the story around it rather than by the detail itself.
Familiarity becomes more consequential once it starts shaping how voters evaluate a candidate’s political fitness. Pew Research found in 2023 that 66% of U.S. adults considered shared political views extremely or very important in candidates they support, while no more than a quarter said the same about each personal characteristic that was measured. Yet campaign discourse continues to correlate familiarity with political value, allowing ordinary preferences and experiences to help candidates appear closer to the people they seek to represent. That emphasis is hard to justify when voters themselves say shared political views matter far more than sharing a candidate’s background.
Relatability can make distance from economic realities easier to overlook because appearing like an ordinary person has become a viable form of authenticity. As such, a wealthy candidate can eat at a chain restaurant or talk about a favorite sports team while supporting policies that affect workers negatively.
Louisiana Senator John Kennedy has built a profile around being witty and folksy, making him feel familiar to his audience. Yet that familiarity offers little indication of how his choices affect the people who recognize themselves in it. Kennedy voted for the 2025 reconciliation law, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates will reduce resources for households at the bottom of the income distribution while increasing them for households higher up.
Sounding like ordinary people and materially serving their interests remain entirely separate political achievements, exposing that manufactured relatability cannot be a measure of representation. Representation concerns itself with what officials do with power, while relatability is interested in whether audiences can recognize something of themselves in the person holding it.
Those details are not regarded across candidates. A 2020 meta-analysis in the Journal of Communication found that female politicians received more coverage focused on appearance and family life than male politicians, showing that this kind of coverage can reproduce older expectations about who deserved to be evaluated through their identity. For women, those expectations often make appearance and family roles part of the test of political credibility in ways male candidates are less likely to encounter. When journalism makes personality a route to political understanding, candidates face different standards for proving that they seem acceptable before their governing choices receive equal attention.
A coffee order can reveal taste, and a song can reveal preference, yet neither tells voters whose interests a politician will protect once familiarity gives way to power. Political journalism weakens its own scrutiny when it treats ordinary habits as evidence of solidarity, because representation should be measured through the consequences of governing rather than the ease with which a candidate can resemble the people watching.
Jacqueline Lee is an Opinion Staff Writer. She can be reached at jacquhl3@uci.edu.
Edited by Julia Kremenetsky
