The Cool Vote

From the rainbow flag to the Confederate battle flag, one basic lesson reinforced this summer is that some political positions are cool and others are not. Something similar goes for presidential contenders.

What makes a would-be POTUS cool? For a party intent on laying claim to a larger share of “the selfie vote,” as pollster Kristen Soltis Anderson calls it, that’s an important question. And for the Republican party, it’s also a fraught one. Ever since the first televised presidential debate, when viewers deemed Kennedy the victor over Nixon, the GOP has struggled with issues of charisma. Reagan’s magnetic presence was all too fleeting, as conservative critics of the officious first President Bush would sigh.