For the last two decades, political scientists have increasingly focused on the relationship between the president and the public in their explorations of presidential power. At the same time, news media have increasingly portrayed occupants of the White House as consumed with public opinion. Despite this, surprisingly little research has been done specifically on how presidents go about learning about public opinion. While a number of studies have revealed a great deal about how and why presidents talk to the nation, much less has been done on how presidents listen to the public.

Robert Eisinger's book makes a significant contribution by providing one of the few multiadministration studies of how presidents learn about and make use of public opinion. Eisinger's central argument is that presidents' use of polling has grown “from a small and secretive enterprise to a large and secretive institution” (p. 5) in order to provide the White House with autonomy from Congress, political parties, and media. The power to assess public opinion is a central tension between the presidency and its rivals as they battle to claim to interpret the public's will.

Eisinger wisely goes beyond the simple question of why presidents need to track public opinion. Given the wide variety of media and other polls, the White House could easily rely on secondhand sources and analyses. Instead, Eisinger's analysis looks at the White House's shifting mix of internal and external sources of public opinion data that the presidency needs in order to gain greater independence from other political actors. Similarly, the author is careful to detail exactly how polling data flows. This distinction is especially important given the book's discovery that presidents often keep information from potential allies in Congress, their party organizations, and, in some cases, members of their own White House staff.

One of the challenges in this research requires uncovering evidence of a process that the White House prefers to keep out of sight. It is clear from the evidence in the book, and through the public condemnations of Bill Clinton and other presidents for using public opinion data, that the White House has little desire for others to be aware of their testing of public opinion. This leaves researchers like Eisinger to dive deep into the archives of past administrations and carefully assemble a picture of a process that is often intentionally concealed, even from many on the White House staff.

Eisinger uses the first two chapters to track the early development of presidential polling. In these introductory chapters, he makes the case that the rise of presidential polling was the product of political forces, rather than having been driven by the technical innovations of the random sample. The middle chapters are used to detail the White House's efforts to gain autonomy from the Congress, political parties, and media. From Eisinger's perspective, these institutions can be viewed as rivals threatened by the president's expanding claim to representation of the people. The author strikes a careful balance between developing the specific cases of each president and his broader theme. By organizing these middle chapters around the conflict with each institution, Eisinger is highlighting his theme. However, the insights into individual administrations and presidential styles are also interesting. Throughout the book, readers find out how the White House has struggled in a variety of ways to find the pulse of the public. One of the most interesting is the Hoover administration's quantification of newspapers' editorial content in order to gauge public opinion (pp. 107–10). This case not only demonstrates that presidents were eager to gauge public sentiments before polling, but it also illustrates the role that newspapers once held in reflecting the public mood.

The rivalry between Congress and the president as the primary interpreter of public opinion is important as each branch struggles for supremacy in the policy process. While an argument can be made that Eisinger overemphasizes this source of tension between the branches by not discussing it within the context of other sources of conflict, he has clearly identified an important source of friction in the sharing of power.

The final chapter examines the administrations of George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Although the study of these administrations is limited because their presidential papers are not available for research, the author uses them to show that the thirst for public opinion data continues to grow.

The book addresses several other issues. One is the question of whether presidents use polls and focus groups to lead or to follow public opinion. While this is not the primary focus of the book, Eisinger's research supports the argument that the White House uses what it learns from polls to market, rather than select, the policies that the president will advocate.

Eisinger concludes that presidential polling has produced mixed results for democracy. On one hand, he argues that polls do provide more reliable indicators of public opinion than reading newspaper editorials and that democracy is best served by use of the most reliable barometer of the public's sentiments. At the same time, the author cautions that polling misses the deliberative nature of public opinion and that the quick and superficial responses summarized in polling data may discourage presidents from developing a deeper understanding of the public's wants and needs.

The Evolution of Presidential Polling provides valuable insights into presidents' use of public opinion. This book will be of great interest to scholars of the presidency and of public opinion in general.