> ...during JFK times...
Not "during JFK times", but in the JFK campaign. Not so much shaping campaigns around beliefs, but assessing who matters to your campaign as a pure technical pursuit.
As for your jab, if you think that the President has somehow foisted his campaign on the electorate, rather than the other way around, that is the sort of profound misapprehension that doomed his opponent.
The fact that voters can be convinced to agree or disagree with the candidate is more or less orthogonal. Do you think that JFK never influenced a voter by speaking?