The official Instagram account of the American Democratic Party (@thedemocrats) recently published a video with archive footage from the era of President John F. Kennedy. The accompanying text, brief and direct: "Our Kennedys 💙". The post would pass without further ado as a nostalgic curiosity or a mere aesthetic choice if it were not part of a broader and deliberate pattern that has been taking shape within the party for months: the systematic recovery of JFK's political imagery as a communication tool ahead of the November 2026 elections, an attempt to reconstruct a positive political narrative after almost a decade in which the Democratic discourse has revolved, mainly, around opposition to Donald Trump.
The question strategists and analysts within the Democratic Party are asking themselves is how to stop being the anti-Trump party to once again be a proactive and initiative-taking group and the answer they are trying out has a sixties flavor: they throw themselves into the arms of the so-called Camelot effect (romantic idealization of political leadership) to try to take flight.
Retro typefaces, black and white photographs, editorial design inspired by the sixties, and a political language centered on hope and public service are becoming increasingly visible traits in the communication of some Democratic leaders, pointing to a trend.
An attempt to recover political optimism
During the last few years, much of the Democrats' discourse has been articulated around the opposition to Trumpism and the defense of institutions against what the party considers democratic threats. Strategists and analysts within the party maintain that that approach has generated an exhausted political narrative, primarily defensive, and that the recovery of the Kennedy imaginary seeks to re-center the message around political optimism, generational renewal, and the idea of national mission.
Kennedy's presidency continues to be perceived in the United States as a symbolic period of modernization, cultural leadership, and collective ambition, marked by milestones such as the boost to the space race or the rhetoric of public service that defined his mandate.
Among the Democratic leaders who have already incorporated this retro style the rising Texan legislator James Talarico stands out, whose political communication —from the typography used in his materials to the tone of his speeches— explicitly refers to the imagery of idealistic leadership associated with the Kennedy presidency.
Talarico, 36, has just won the Democratic primary for the Texas Senate. A former school teacher and Presbyterian seminarian, he won the primary with a deliberately artisanal and anti-corporate visual aesthetic: imperfect typography, black and white, a 'branding' that Fast Company analyzed this week as an explicit rejection of the corporate political language of recent decades. It is not a Kennedy aesthetic in the strict sense, but it does share with it the same commitment to a politics that seems human, not manufactured.
what is the 'camelot effect'
Jackie Kennedy and the construction of a myth
The term "Camelot" applied to the Kennedy presidency did not emerge spontaneously nor was it coined by any journalist. It was coined by Jackie Kennedy herself, deliberately, one week after her husband's assassination in Dallas.
In an interview granted to journalist Theodore White, from Life magazine, in November 1963, Jackie repeatedly evoked the Broadway musical 'Camelot' -which JFK listened to before sleeping- and its final verses: "Don't let it be forgot that there once was a spot, for one brief shining moment, that was known as Camelot".
Life's editors, who were waiting to have the interview to close the magazine's edition, at a cost of 30,000 dollars an hour, wanted to soften the emphasis placed by Jackie Kennedy on that metaphor but she refused and edited the text herself.
What Jackie Kennedy's stubbornness built at that moment was not a memory, but a myth: the image of a golden era that would never be repeated and whose loss should fill any American who identified with its values with melancholy and a sense of moral urgency.
The myth of Camelot does not describe what actually happened during the Kennedy presidency, but how it would be remembered. It is a deliberate construction that also served to hide the less glamorous parts of the Kennedy presidency: the narrow electoral victory, international failures, the president's infidelities. The brilliance of the myth and the shadows of reality have always coexisted.
When the Democratic Party recovers that imaginary today it is not appealing to a spontaneous collective memory, it is reproducing a narrative control operation that already worked once.
It is not a matter of nostalgia, but of strategy.
Generational handover in the party
The recourse to that sixties aesthetic also coincides with an internal debate about generational leadership in the Democratic Party. For years, the central figures of the party have been represented by veteran leaders such as Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi or Chuck Schumer.
Now, a new generation of Democratic politicians tries to open up political space within the party. Among the names that most frequently appear in that generational transition are Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Pete Buttigieg, Raphael Warnock or Talarico himself.
In that context, the reference to Kennedy functions as symbol of generational renewal, by evoking the figure of a young president who represented a political and cultural change in the United States.
I’m running for the U.S. Senate.
— James Talarico (@jamestalarico) September 9, 2025
Billionaires have taken over Texas and taken over America — but together, we can take power back for working people.
Join this movement: https://t.co/Cam7Y742fM pic.twitter.com/jPIrIJeX0A
Liberal patriotism versus polarization
Another of the objectives of this communicative strategy would be to recover a narrative of liberal patriotism that some Democrats consider weakened in the American political debate.
Kennedy's legacy combines elements that the party seeks to reintegrate into its discourse: national pride, technological ambition, international leadership, and expansion of civil rights. This combination allows for the construction of an alternative patriotic narrative, both to the nationalism driven by Trump and to the more technocratic approach that partly characterized Democratic politics during the last decade.
For some analysts, the reappearance of the Kennedy imaginary is associated with the 20th-century American liberal tradition, represented by presidents such as Franklin D. Roosevelt, Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson. In that historical narrative, the Democratic Party is presented as the engine of great national transformations, from the New Deal to the expansion of civil rights.
The Kennedy aesthetic as a symbolic instrument to reactivate that narrative: politics as a collective project of progress, moral leadership, and generational renewal. The family saga as the party's moral heritage against a Trump who has rebranded the Kennedy Center with his own name and announced its closure for "renovation." Democrats have been using this conflict for weeks as a symbol of cultural aggression: in February, a group of Democratic congressmen sent a letter accusing Trump of behaving "like a delinquent graffiti artist" by adding his name to the only national memorial dedicated to JFK.
At the same time, Jack Schlossberg, JFK's grandson, has been for weeks the Democratic politician who garners the most attention from American media. At 33 years old, Schlossberg is running in the Democratic primaries in New York's 12th district to fill the seat of retired congressman Jerry Nadler. His campaign has no formal manager, it is based on social media and his last name precedes him in every public appearance. The message he conveys is explicit: the Kennedys belong to the Democrats, not to Trump.
The precedent of the Obama campaign
In any case, trying to capitalize on the mythical figure of Kennedy is a recurring strategy among Democrats given that on not a few occasions it has worked. The presidential campaign of Barack Obama, in 2008, also used a generational narrative of political renewal indirectly inspired by the tradition of the president assassinated in Dallas.
Obama launched his candidacy in Springfield (Illinois), a place symbolically associated with Abraham Lincoln, and received during the primaries the decisive endorsement of Ted Kennedy, JFK's brother. At that time, Obama did not imitate Kennedy, he presented himself as his natural continuation.
Obama's campaign additionally introduced an innovative political aesthetic for the digital age, symbolized in the famous "Hope" poster created by the artist Shepard Fairey.
In 2008 the Democratic Party was in a phase of political expansion after the presidency of George W. Bush. Now, the Democrats find themselves with institutional wear and tear and a search for a new political identity after the cycle dominated by Trump. Although the context may be different, the communicative path that the Democratic Party seems to be entrusting itself to in order to reconquer the White House is similar.
The Kennedy iconography is Democratic heritage and, although the American press wonders if the JFK legacy is still valuable, in the party a majority still sees it as gold in times of crisis, a value considered safe in which to take refuge.
Political memory as a communication tool: Kennedy, Sánchez and the 'No to war'
On the other hand, we see how contemporary politics increasingly uses historical and cultural references to build a political narrative.
Reactivating known symbols from the past allows current leaders to connect with deep political identities of the electorate, something especially relevant in contexts of polarization and narrative competition between ideological blocs.
If this trend is appreciated in the United States, with the Democratic recovery of John F. Kennedy's imagery, through visual aesthetics and political branding, in Spain the recourse to the retro has been an opportune, recent and unexpected ace up the sleeve to which the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has resorted, through political language and that 'No to war' resurrected to oppose the American and Israeli attack against Iran outside international legality.
Sánchez has wanted to return to a political framework conducive to his interests. He is not describing the current geopolitical reality, he is activating a political identity and an interpretive framework. The pacifist and institutional slogan refers directly to the mobilizations against Spain's participation in the Iraq war in 2003, during the Government of José María Aznar, and connects with the historical identity of the Spanish left.
In contexts of uncertainty or polarization, parties tend to recover moments from the past that symbolize social mobilization, political victories, and historical consensuses. Sánchez's 'No to war' of 2026 seeks activate emotions and his electorate.