Parties' lead candidates can provide heuristic cues that serve as information shortcuts, helping voters choose. Much research on the personalisation of politics assumes that only unsophisticated voters rely on this information shortcut to reach a vote choice since sophisticated voters possess the necessary political knowledge to render such compensation strategies obsolete. However, the empirical evidence does not support this expectation. Following Lau and Redlawsk (2006), this contribution addresses how decision difficulty and political sophistication of a voter interact to condition the use of candidate heuristics in vote choices. Fazio's (1990) MODE model states that an individual must have both high motivation and the opportunity, i.e., the time and resources, to engage in an elaborate decision strategy, otherwise automatically activated attitudes (e.g., candidate evaluation) guide decision making. In 2009 in Germany, two state elections took place on the same day as the federal election. A concurrent election introduces an additional choice that should demand additional attention from voters while at the same time overwhelming them with additional information. This should make vote choice more difficult, decreasing the opportunity for elaborate processing while increasing automatic processing, i.e., using candidate heuristics. This leads to the expectation that candidate evaluations will have a greater influence on the vote choice of politically sophisticated voters facing two elections than when facing only one election. GLES Panel survey data from 2009 is used to examine the interaction effect of political sophistication, concurrent elections, and candidate evaluations on vote choice in multinomial logistic regressions.