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Truman tried to recruit Eisenhower to run for president again in 1951, as a Democrat. It was at this time that Eisenhower formally voiced his disagreements with the Democratic party and declared himself and his family to be Republicans. This spawned a "Draft Eisenhower" movement in the Republican Party and he either decided or was convinced to declare his candidacy in the 1952 presidential election, offering an opposing view to the candidacy of non-interventionist Senator Robert A. Taft. In June 1952 he resigned his command at NATO to campaign full-time. Eisenhower defeated Taft for the nomination. His campaign had the simple but effective slogan, "I Like Ike". Eisenhower expressed his opposition to Roosevelt's policy at Yalta and Truman's policies in Korea and China. He campaigned in the general election on three issues: Korea, Communism and corruption. He was highly critical of his former boss Harry Truman. He defeated Democratic candidate Adlai Stevenson II in a landslide, with an electoral margin of 442 to 89, marking the first Republican return to the White House in 20 years. The election resulted in a Republican majority in the House (by eight votes) and a tie in the Senate with Vice-President Richard Nixon providing the majority vote.
Eisenhower entered office determined to contain the expansion of the Soviet Union and reduce federal deficits. In 1953, he threatened to use nuclear weapons until China agreed to terms regarding POWs in the Korean War. The war ended with a return to the pre-war status quo. He prioritized inexpensive nuclear weapons while reducing funding for expensive Army divisions. On the domestic front, Eisenhower continued Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal agencies and expanded Social Security. He covertly opposed Joseph McCarthy and his largest program was the Interstate Highway System. Remarkably, he entered office as a popular president, and yet he scored his highest approval rating near the end of his first term on November 22, 1955 when his polling numbers showed a 77% approval rating. (He reached the same level of popularity again on December 19, 1956 after being re-elected to a second term in office.
It is difficult to isolate a single event at that time which led to such a high approval rating. This was the beginning of the television age, and Eisenhower took advantage of modern communication methods. On January 19, 1955 Eisenhower became the first president to conduct a televised news conference. His press secretary, James Campbell Hagerty, is the only person to have served in that capacity for two full presidential terms, and is considered by some historians to be the best press secretary in presidential history.
Eisenhower took a different approach to tax cuts from that adopted by recent Republican Presidents. When Eisenhower became president, the tax rate for the highest tax bracket was 91%, the highest in American history. When Republicans gained control of both houses of the Congress following the 1952 election, conservatives pressed the president to support tax cuts. Eisenhower however, gave a higher priority to balancing the budget, and believed that taxes could not be cut until it was. He said, at one press conference, "We cannot afford to reduce taxes, and reduce income until we have in sight a program of expenditure that shows that the factors of income and outgo will be balanced." Eisenhower kept the national debt low and inflation near zero. Three of his eight budgets were surplus budgets.
The high polling numbers followed on the heels of a major health scare. On September 24, 1955, while vacationing in Colorado, Eisenhower suffered a serious heart attack. His personal physician misdiagnosed the symptoms as indigestion, and failed to call in the help that was urgently needed. The heart attack required six weeks' hospitalization. Nixon, Dulles, and Sherman Adams assumed administrative duties and provided communication with the President. Remarkably, his cardiologist Paul Dudley White recommended that Eisenhower run for a second term and described this as being "essential to his recovery". The American public rallied behind their president as he returned to work.
On Tuesday, November 6, 1956, Eisenhower, a popular incumbent, won re-election as president. The election was a re-match of 1952, as Eisenhower's opponent in 1956 was Adlai Stevenson, a former Illinois governor, whom Eisenhower had defeated four years earlier. During the campaign Eisenhower's health had become a concern. But the country enjoyed peace and economic growth. Pollsters discovered that the qualities which voters liked most about Eisenhower were "his sincerity, his integrity and sense of duty, his virtue as a family man, his religious devotion, and his sheer likeableness."
Eisenhower's second term saw erosion in his personal popularity. His approval ratings reached their all-time low of 47% on March 25, 1958, still a pretty good rating for an incumbent president. Much of the drop in his popularity came from southern states after Eisenhower took the principled decision to enforce an order of the Supreme Court following its famous decision in Brown v. Board of Education. In September of 1957, the state of Arkansas refused to honor a federal court order to integrate their public school system stemming from the Brown decision. Eisenhower demanded that Arkansas governor Orval Faubus obey the court order and when Faubus refused, Eisenhower placed the Arkansas National Guard under federal control and sent in the 101st Airborne Division. They escorted and protected nine black students, permitting them to enter Little Rock Central High School, an all-white public school, for the first time since the Reconstruction Era.
The main reason for the decline in Eisenhower's popularity was likely because of a recession that the nation was suffering. It had began in August of 1957 and continued into the late spring of 1958. Earlier in March of 1958, the Soviet Union had performed atmospheric nuclear testing and Eisenhower's opponents in Congress, including Massachusetts Senator John F. Kennedy, were beginning to complain, inaccurately, that a missile gap was developing with the Russians, fueling fears of a nuclear conflict with the Russians.
But the popular president's polling numbers recovered, spiking again in the high 70% range in early 1960. He left office with approval ratings near 60%, as he warned Americans in his farewell address to "guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex."