That Funny Smell

The results of a scientific study seem to be tailor-made for political comedy:

If you hate bad body odour, you’re more likely to support Trump

(Image from Daily Mail)

Italian scientist Marco Liuzza theorized that people who came from regions rife with disease were especially sensitive to bad smells. This physical aversion would lead them to have "right-wing authoritarian views" that tend to reject foreign people and unfamiliar ideas. [bold added]

Members of the team have developed a body-odour disgust scale (BODS). This is based on asking volunteers a series of questions about different scenarios, such as noticing that a friend’s feet smell. From this it can be established how strongly, on a scale of one to five, a person reacts to bad smells...

The volunteers completed the BODS questionnaire and others that gauged the extent to which they sympathised with certain authoritarian views (“Our country needs a powerful leader, in order to destroy the radical and immoral currents prevailing in society today”, for instance) and with more socially, fiscally or morally conservative views. The researchers found that those scoring highly on the BODS scale did indeed hold more authoritarian views. They found no such correlation between the BODS score and more broadly conservative opinions.

(Note, dear reader, that authoritarianism and conservatism 1) are two different things and 2) were not correlated.)

So why hasn't this study been more publicized by TV news that is 91% negative to Donald Trump? The jokes write themselves---Trump voters held their nose and voted for him, they sniff at coastal elites, etc.

However, rejoinders are easy: Progressives stink, Occupy Wall Street was so offensive that it was closed due to health reasons, etc.

Could the solution be this simple? Americans wouldn't be so divided if they used more deodorant.