A record of the heights of the presidents of the United States and presidential candidates is useful for evaluating what role, if any, height plays in presidential elections. Some observers have noted that the taller of the two major-party candidates tends to prevail, and argue this is due to the public's preference for taller candidates. The tallest U.S. president was Abraham Lincoln at , while the shortest was James Madison at . Joe Biden, the current president, is according to a physical examination summary from February 2023. U.S. presidents by height order Electoral success as a function of height Folk wisdom about U.S. presidential politics holds that the taller of the two major-party candidates always wins or almost always wins since the advent of the televised presidential debate. There are more data if the relationship of electoral success to height difference starts from the year 1900, rather than from the beginning of televised debates. In the thirty-one presidential elections between 1900 and 2020, twenty-one of the winning candidates have been taller than their opponents, while nine have been shorter, and one was the same height. On average the winner was taller than the loser. However, it may be argued that drawing the line at any date ignores the fact that pictorial depictions of presidential hopefuls have been available to the American public at large well before debates were televised. Stereographs were widely used as a form of photojournalism for historical events (including political events) by the 1870s. Cutting off the date at 1900 excludes the seven presidential elections immediately preceding where the taller candidate won only once (which, when included, partially equalizes the ratio to 22 taller vs. 14 shorter winners between 1872 and 2020). Considering that political cartoons and text-based descriptions of candidates have been a staple of American politics since the beginning, one could argue that Americans have always been able to compare candidates by height. Thus, upon including all elections until 2020 where the heights of each candidate are known, the average height of the winner above the loser drops to a mere ; this average height difference becomes little more than a round-off error—a mere —when excluding the 2016 election, in which gender not only accounted for the height difference, but was likely the greater physical distinction between the two main candidates than height. The claims about taller candidates winning almost all modern presidential elections is