There’s no such thing as a Republican font

Last week, two fonts became the unlikely stars of a political messaging firestorm, after the The President administration replaced Calibri as its official diplomatic font in favor of Times New Roman, claiming that an initial shift to Calibri in 2023 was part of former President Biden’s “DEIA” agenda. The implication was clear: Calibri was framed as a liberal, Democratic font; while Times New Roman took its place as the The President administration’s more conservative choice. Now, a new study is revealing the major flaw in this logic: font is certainly a political tool, but it’s not inherently partisan.

The study, titled “You’re Just Not My Type: How Attitudes Towards Fonts Explain Affective Polarization,” examines how affective polarization—or the tendency to associate positive feelings with one’s political ingroup, and negative feelings with outgroups—impacts people’s reception of different fonts. The study showed that, across multiple kinds of fonts, respondents were more likely to respond favorably to a font if they were told that it was associated with their own partisan and ideological beliefs.

As the study’s conclusion explains, “People will ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ the typeface in a political logo based on their political views of the candidate it represents.” According to the researchers behind the study, Katherine Haenschen, Shannon Zenner, and Jessica R. Collier, this finding demonstrates that campaign designers shouldn’t feel constrained to only using certain kinds of fonts in their work—because, at the end of the day, constituents vote for candidates, not fonts.

Emotion leads to analytical inconsistency

This new study adds another layer of nuance to several years worth of research on how fonts are perceived in a political context.

In 2019, an initial study coauthored by Haenschen found that individuals do make some instinctive ideological distinctions between typefaces. Serifs, like Times New Roman or Garamond, were rated by study participants as more conservative; while sans serifs such as Helvetica or Arial were rated as more liberal. But that perception isn’t the same as reality. Based on 2020 data from the Center for American Politics and Design, both Democrats and Republicans are more likely to use sans serif fonts, with 68% of Democratic candidates and 62% of Republican candidates using sans serifs that year, respectively.

Haenschen, Zenner, and Collier’s research offers more context on why that might be the case. Across three survey experiments, the researchers tested the relationship between political identity and emotional reactions to typefaces. They found that, when it comes to fonts in politics, emotions matter more than stylistic preference. 

In one condition, participants were shown a font along with a brief description framing it as ideologically associated—like, for example, “Time magazine rates Garamond as the most conservative font.” In another, participants were shown a typeface with a partisan description (which refers to party affiliation), like, “Time magazine rates Century Gothic as the most Democratic font.”  They were then asked to rate how much they liked the font.

In both the ideological and partisan cases, respondents’ favorability ratings were noticeably impacted by their own political views. And the more partisan a respondent was, the more these descriptors impacted their choices.

“If you tell me, ‘This font is liked by conservatives,’ and I’m a conservative, then that makes me like it even more,” Zenner says. “If you tell me that liberals like this typeface, and I’m not a liberal, then I tend to dislike that typeface—or it will affect how much I like it.” 

While some respondents resisted these impacts, she says, most people’s political affiliation dominated their responses more than their actual taste. “We saw that the political grouping you have can really overrun any kind of taste.”

But it’s good news for designers, actually

For campaign designers, these results may actually be good news. Zenner says designers shouldn’t worry about constraining their font choices based on ideological associations, because, ultimately, voters will associate their positive (or negative) feelings about a candidate with the font itself. 

“Designers need to keep in mind that they still have the ability to make choices about typefaces,” Zenner says. “They shouldn’t say, ‘I can only pick a sans serif typeface if we have a liberal candidate,’ or ‘I can only pick a serif if we have a conservative candidate,’ because, no matter what, the partisanship of the people who are voting swamps all these taste-level things.”

For some candidates, she adds, this research also opens the door to convey a more nuanced platform through design. For example, a Republican candidate campaigning in a swing state might opt for a sans serif font more traditionally perceived “liberal” to communicate a more forward-thinking, modern, or progressive stance, without actually alienating their voters.

Affective polarization can also help explain how a font can so easily become a political flashpoint, as in the case of the The President administration’s nixing of Calibri in favor of Times New Roman. As soon as these typefaces became a topic of political discussion, Zenner says, the way people responded to them became inherently tied to their own political affiliations. It’s no longer about how the font looks, or works, or whether anyone actually likes it—it’s all about how it’s been politically labeled.

“People will be like, ‘I only want stuff that looks like Times New Roman because I associate with MAGA and The President, and therefore I’m going to back that up,’” Zenner says. “Or the opposite will be like, ‘I’m definitely going to use Calibri in everything and I am going to make a statement by doing that, and I don’t know if I even care for it or if I like it or not—it’ll just be the politics of it.’ I think it’s an example of where, yes, these differences in taste exist, but they’re very much driven by culture.”

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