People are quick to infer the character of others from their faces. Plato believed that this tendency would cause people to elect inferior leaders (Plato, 1901). Modern research has found that the predisposition to make snap judgments affects hiring decisions (Meehl, 1965). Moreover, work on thin-slice judgments suggests that social evaluations may be made very quickly, to the extent that they are an automatic rather than a controlled process. Ambady and Rosenthal (1992) reported that evaluative judgments made from “fleeting glimpses” or thin slices of expressive behavior were accurate given as little as 30 seconds of exposure. Bar, Neta, and Linz (2006) found that consistent facial impressions were formed from just 39 ms of exposure. However, Carney, Colvin, and Hall (2007) determined that the accuracy of such first impressions depends on the judgment being made. We reasoned that irrespective of whether snap judgments of character were accurate or not, they might provide accurate predictions of voting decisions well in advance of polling day, even before candidates had announced their intentions to run for election. To test this hypothesis, we conducted an experiment to discover whether candidates who look competent receive more votes than other candidates. Specifically, we sought to predict the two major party nominees and the outcome of the 2008 U.S. presidential election as early as August 2007. We obtained facial competence ratings of 11 potential candidates for the Democratic Party nomination and 13 for the Republican Party nomination. To avoid raters who recognized the potential candidates, we used high school and university students from Australia and New Zealand. A smaller number of American university students also rated the candidates, but in no case was a score used if the rater recognized the candidate.