Interrogating one case of what Stephen Skowronek calls the “preemptive” Presidency, I examine Dwight D. Eisenhower's New Republican project as it manifested itself in House elections and lawmaking. To that end, I assess the ideological characteristics, electoral dynamics, and roll-call behavior of the four cohorts elected to the House between 1952 and 1958. Synthesizing qualitative accounts and quantitative evidence, I determine that the Eisenhower years reshuffled party commitments in the House by leaving more-moderate but numerically decimated Republicans to battle ideologically galvanized and numerically strengthened Democrats in the 1960s. In short, Eisenhower affected the party system in identifiable ways, but he struggled to leave the legacies he envisioned when he took office. Beyond the specifics of the Eisenhower case, the methodology developed here is broadly applicable across Presidencies.
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