This book reports extensive analyses of a vast and diverse set of survey studies of presidential candidates, presidents, and their parties that have accumulated over the past seven decades to demonstrate that modern presidents from Truman to Trump have had a profound, pervasive, and lasting impact on how the public views their parties. It argues that a president’s words and actions articulate and define his party’s current principles and objectives. Judgments about the president’s competence in managing domestic and foreign affairs inform assessments of the party’s competence in such matters. ... More

This book reports extensive analyses of a vast and diverse set of survey studies of presidential candidates, presidents, and their parties that have accumulated over the past seven decades to demonstrate that modern presidents from Truman to Trump have had a profound, pervasive, and lasting impact on how the public views their parties. It argues that a president’s words and actions articulate and define his party’s current principles and objectives. Judgments about the president’s competence in managing domestic and foreign affairs inform assessments of the party’s competence in such matters. The components of a president’s supporting coalition, and the interests he favors while governing, help to define the party’s constituent social base and thus appeal as an object of individual identification. People’s affective reactions to the president, whatever their source, color their feelings about the other politicians in his coalition. Every president thus shapes public attitudes toward his party as well as beliefs about who and what it stands for and how well it governs when in office. Insofar as the party label represents a brand name, the president bears prime responsibility for the brand’s current image and status. The most proximate and concrete consequences for the president’s party register when the ballots are counted on election day, but presidents also affect their parties’ fortunes in the longer run, for their successes or failures influence partisan attachments, identities, and images that remain long after they are gone from the scene.