Presidents and Parties represents an endeavor spanning more than a decade that began with Gary Jacobson’s examination of the “collateral damage” that George W. Bush inflicted on the Republican Party. It builds on several articles exploring whether Bush’s effect on his party applied to the modern presidency more generally. Painstakingly analyzing a “rich treasure trove” of data from the postwar period, Jacobson concludes that the White House’s influence on the “public’s opinions of, beliefs about, and identification with the national parties” has been “profound and pervasive” (pp. xix, 223). Presidents’ approval ratings and policies influence the public’s perception of what their party stands for, evaluations of their partisan brethren in Congress, and assessments of party competence. Jacobson also shows persuasively that attitudes about presidential competence have a significant effect on midterm elections; indeed, by the 1990s, congressional and local elections had largely become referenda on presidential leadership.

Jacobson acknowledges that the idea that presidents have been “prime movers” in shaping national parties is neither “new or controversial.” He credits, in particular, a number of institutional and American political development scholars who have shed light on the reciprocal relationship between the modern executive and party organizations; for example, see Sidney M. Milkis, The President and the Parties: The Transformation of American Party System since the New Deal, 1993; Stephen Skowronek, The Politics Presidents Make: Leadership from John Adams to Bill Clinton, 1997; Daniel J. Galvin, Presidential Party Building: Dwight D. Eisenhower to George W. Bush, 2010; and Richard C. Smith and Richard A. Seltzer, Polarization and the Presidency: From FDR to Barack Obama, 2015.

The major concern of Presidents and Parties “is with the ways in which presidents affect how [the public audience] comes to regard” presidents and parties (p. 2). Jacobson argues, “The president’s influence on popular beliefs and attitudes towards the parties occurs independently…of his deliberate party-building activities,” as highlighted by Daniel Galvin, or position in “political time,” which frames Stephen Skowronek’s seminal study of the larger political forces that influence presidential leadership. Jacobson’s fine-tuned analysis of cross-sectional and panel surveys show that all postwar presidents have had a significant influence on the public’s view of parties, but that Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama were particularly influential in “branding” the Republican and Democratic parties, respectively. Yet the disproportionate partisan effects of these two presidents, he insists, do not map easily onto how presidents have interacted with party institutions or confronted macropolitical forces (p. 226).

Jacobson does not develop a theory or conceptual framework to account for presidents’ influence on partisan opinions. The strength of this book is its inductive reasoning. Jacobson’s nuanced and comprehensive analysis of postwar surveys leaves little doubt that the relationship between presidents and parties in the public’s mind has grown stronger since the 1970s, a “coevolution” that seems closely connected to the rise of partisan polarization. His analysis of the rich interplay between presidents and partisan loyalties is especially important and interesting. Taking account of the social-psychological model, which views partisan loyalty as rooted in strong family and group attachments, and rational choice (Bayesian) theory, which views party affiliations as a running tally of experiences, Jacobson grants how presidential partisanship rarely realigns party attachments. However, some presidents move the needle as a consequence of an important election (Reagan in 1980; see chap. 6) or of a “generational imprint” (Obama’s strong bond with millennials; see chap. 7). Of course, as Jacobson learned of Bush 43 and confirms in Presidents and Parties, some presidents do damage to their parties. Although Bush’s disastrous second term did not seem to denigrate the Republican brand enduringly, Jacobson ends the book with the speculation that Donald Trump’s iconoclastic and disruptive presidency, which seems to cut against the tide of major social and demographic changes in the United States, might “be handing the future to the Democrats, if only by default” (p. 222).

So, what explains presidents’ influence on the public perception of political parties? To the degree he tackles this question, Jacobson reprises work on the emergence of the modern presidency. Since Roosevelt, the White House has become the center of American politics and an important factor in the transformation of political parties from decentralized, patronage-based groups to national and programmatic organizations. Except during wartime and political crises, nineteenth-century presidents were constrained by highly mobilized and localized partisanship that privileged Congress and the states. Twentieth-century presidents, abetted by mass media and party reforms (the media-driven, plebiscitary primary system should have been given more attention in this book), have gradually but decisively established presidents as the repository of party responsibility.

For a time, tasked with managing the welfare and national security state forged during the New Deal political realignment, the modern executive attained a status that transcended party politics. Jacobson’s data confirm the received wisdom that partisanship was subdued from the 1940s until the late 1970s. Yet so long as Democrats and Republicans had different ideas of what the executive-centered administrative state should do—a divide that sharpened considerably when Reagan became the first Republican president to directly challenge the Liberal state—presidents could no longer stay above the fray. To invoke Jacobson’s refrain, all modern presidents presume to be “uniters,” but the rise of partisan rancor has driven them to become “dividers” (chap. 9).

Jacobson intended to end the book with Obama, but the extraordinarily disruptive 2016 election and the first year of the Trump presidency beckoned. The wealth of survey data Jacobson expertly examines, however, does not explain how a bombastic reality TV star could so readily capture the Republican Party. Donald Trump’s ideological promiscuity led survey respondents to see an uncommonly weak relationship between his ideology and the Republican Party (p. 119); yet two and a half years into his presidency, the GOP has become the Trump party. Of course, Trump did not appear out of nowhere; his right-wing populism marks a dangerous culmination of developments playing out since the 1960s that have eroded the “vital center” that once sustained the New Deal political order (see Arthur Schlesinger Jr., The Vital Center: The Politics of Freedom, 1949). To a remarkable degree, economic disagreements have been displaced by conflicts over race, immigration, gender, and globalism that have sharply divided the country and rattled national resolve.

The roles that Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama played in advancing what Hugh Heclo called “Sixties Civics,” with the public demanding more from government and trusting it less, might help explain their outsized influence on the Republican and Democratic Parties, respectively (“Sixties Civics,” in Sidney Milkis and Jerome Mileur, ed., The Great Society and the High Tide of Liberalism, 2005). After Reagan recruited the Christian Right as a critical ally in his push for a national conservative offensive, the Republican Party no longer wanted to roll back the state. Rather, it became committed to redeploying state power in the service of conservative objectives: fighting communism and upholding “traditional” values (Nicholas J. Jacobs, Desmond King, and Sidney M. Milkis, “Building a Conservative State: Partisan Polarization and the Redeployment of Administrative Power,” Perspectives on Politics, 17 (2), 2019). With Barack Obama’s election as the first African American president, the Democratic Party became identified with the causes that animated the Great Society, strengthening, at least at the presidential level, what Ronald Brownstein has called the “Coalition of the Ascendant”: millennials, minorities, the LGBTQ community and educated professionals, especially women (Brownstein, “The Clinton Conundrum,” The Atlantic, 2015). Obama grasped the scepter of partisan leadership somewhat reluctantly; however, in the face of fierce Republican resistance, which cost Democrats the House in 2010 and the Senate in 2014, he began to use the powers of the modern executive to advance policies celebrated by post–New Deal liberals, especially in matters related to immigration, which became the major fault line of American politics during the 2016 campaign.

Reagan and Obama, therefore, were so consequential because they played a principal part in bringing to a head conflicts between conservatism and liberalism that had been festering since the late 1960s. These raw disputes—centering on the fundamental question of what it means to be an American—enabled a clever demagogue like Trump to rouse atavistic resistance to the Obama coalition. He has styled himself as the leader of a “coalition of restoration,” comprised of blue-collar, evangelical, and nonurban whites, who are frightened and resentful about demographic change and the forging of a state that is hostile to “traditional” values (Brownstein, “The Clinton Conundrum”).

In tracing the belief systems that have been associated with this phenomenon, Presidents and Parties makes a major contribution. Yet Trump’s remarkable and troubling emergence in American politics cannot be adequately ascertained without attending carefully to how the rise of a presidency-centered democracy has corroded the institutions that have traditionally curbed executive aggrandizement. This task requires scholars to stop treating institutions, political organizations, and public opinion as factors that can be studied independently. Instead, we should encourage more synoptic research that can begin to grasp the joining of executive prerogative, social activism, and partisanship.