RICH KAYE: The Kennedy Lesson Republicans Still Haven't Learned

Tuesday night was a disaster for Republicans, and we should stop pretending it was only about the issues. Democrats took back the House and the Senate. They flipped seats in Texas and North Carolina. Here in Georgia, Jon Ossoff won another six years.

The post-mortems have already started. Some will blame the economy. Some will blame the war. Some will blame redistricting that backfired. All of that matters. But a lesson lies beneath every one of those losses, and it is one this party was taught more than sixty years ago and never learned.

American politics stopped being a contest of ideas a long time ago. It became a contest of images. And Republicans keep showing up to a screen test as if it were a policy seminar.

September 26, 1960: the night politics became television

Richard Nixon walked into a Chicago TV studio as the sitting vice president, the man with the experience and the foreign-policy credentials. He walked out having lost the first televised presidential debate in American history.

He didn’t lose it on substance. Nixon had just spent nearly two weeks at Walter Reed with an infected knee. He had lost weight, he was running a fever, and he banged the same knee getting out of the car at the studio. He turned down professional makeup and covered his five o’clock shadow with a drugstore product. His light gray suit faded into the gray backdrop. Under the hot lights, he sweated, and he looked every bit as sick as he was.

John Kennedy, tanned and rested, looked like a movie star. He took the makeup. He wore a dark suit. He looked into the camera like he owned it.

Historians still argue about the famous story that radio listeners thought Nixon won. That story rests on one thin poll. But nobody argues about what the television audience saw, or how much that picture has shaped every campaign since. Nixon learned the lesson. He put on weight, wore the makeup, and held his own in the next three debates. It was too late. Kennedy won one of the closest elections in American history.

That was the moment the camera became the most important voter in the room. Republicans have been underestimating it ever since.

Sixty years of the same lesson

Look at who has won since, and the pattern is hard to miss.

Barack Obama. In 2007, he announced his candidacy for president with barely two years in the U.S. Senate behind him. Before that, he was a state senator in Illinois. That is a thin résumé for the most powerful job on earth. But he looked good, he spoke beautifully, and voters fell for the performance before they ever asked about the record.

Gavin Newsom. California has some of the highest housing costs, gas prices, and homelessness numbers in the country, and its governor is still treated as a national star. Why? Because he looks like a president from central casting. Plenty of voters who would never support his policies will tell you, if they’re honest, that he “seems presidential.” That is the camera talking.

Jon Ossoff. Georgians just re-elected him. Ask an average voter to name something he has accomplished in the Senate and watch them struggle. Republicans spent this fall hammering him for his grooming bills—his campaign paid a Hollywood makeup artist more than $4,600 this year, more than any other federal candidate, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Voters shrugged. Here’s the part Republicans should sit with: the attack didn’t work because voters don’t mind a candidate who invests in looking good. They reward it.

Donald Trump. Our own party’s greatest political success of this century came from a man who spent fourteen seasons as the star of a network reality show. He understood television better than any politician alive, and he beat sixteen Republican career politicians in 2016 because of it.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. She was tending bar in New York in 2017. A year later, she knocked off the fourth-ranking Democrat in the House. She didn’t do it with a policy white paper. She did it with a campaign video that looked like a movie trailer, and she has been a social media phenomenon ever since.

The lesson isn’t that voters are stupid. It’s that voters are human. People decide in seconds whether they trust a face, then look for reasons to agree with their gut. America has become a reality TV show, and the casting matters as much as the script.

What I saw in the war room

On Tuesday, I sat in the Republican Protect the Vote War Room and watched our leads slip away on the screens. One image has stayed with me. The news showed Rick Jackson and his wife, Melody, walking out after casting their ballots.

I want to be fair to them. Rick Jackson’s story is a remarkable American one: he grew up in public housing and foster homes and built one of Georgia’s biggest companies. Melody Jackson is a brilliant Georgia Tech professor who runs a research center there. These are accomplished, decent people.

But on that screen, they looked like everyone’s grandparents. And I couldn’t help thinking about the young voters watching the same footage. What would a 25-year-old in Midtown see in that moment? Not the life story, and not the résumé. Just two people who didn’t look like anyone in their world. In a contest decided by images, that matters, whether we like it or not.

Hold casting calls

So here is my proposal, and I know how it sounds: the Republican Party should start recruiting candidates the way Hollywood casts a lead.

1. Open casting calls in every state — Not just for Senate and governor, but for state house, county commission, and school board. Build the bench from the bottom.
2. Put every prospect on camera — Have each one record a short video: who they are, why they’re running, what they’d fight for. Let us see how they come across before we spend a dime.
3. Test them with real voters — Hire a professional focus-group firm. Show those videos to swing voters, independents, and soft Democrats, and ask the only question that matters: would you vote for this person?
4. Back the ones who connect — Put the party’s money, staff, and media training behind the candidates who score well, male and female, in every community.
5. Then teach them the issues — Policy can be learned. Presence is much harder to teach.

Democrats already do a version of this. They recruit veterans, prosecutors and fresh faces who photograph well, then build the résumé around them. We keep nominating whoever waited longest in line or is loudest online, then act surprised when they freeze under the studio lights.

None of this means abandoning conservative principles. It means finding the right messengers for them. The best ideas in the world lose if the person delivering them looks like Nixon in 1960.

The lesson, finally

Richard Nixon figured it out after one bad night in Chicago. It took him eight more years to win the White House. The Republican Party has had sixty-six years and still hasn’t fully absorbed it.

We can keep telling ourselves that voters should care more about the issues. Or we can accept the electorate we actually have. Politics is television now, and television is a beauty contest. Until Republicans start running candidates who win the screen test, we will keep waking up on the morning after an election like this one.

Rich Kaye is a practicing attorney based in Atlanta, Georgia.