Democrats are Better Presidents

From time to time historians rank presidents, and Wikipedia has compiled all modern rankings into a colorful table. Before considering any details it is obvious that good and bad presidents come in waves. The first seven presidents - from Washington to Jackson - are all ranked in the top 50% of presidents, but during the next fifty years the nation was mostly cursed with presidents considered to be in the bottom 50%, from Van Buren to Harrison. Of course, the best president of all, according to virtually all rankings, Lincoln, is right in the middle of that period of pathetic presidents, and only two others, Polk and Cleveland, are considered better than average.

During the 1910s there were three good presidents (McKinley, T. Roosevelt and Wilson), sandwiched around the ho-hum Taft. The 1920s were solidly bad, but then from F. Roosevelt through L. Johnson the country had effective presidents. These were followed by three weak presidents - Nixon, Ford and Carter, and since then, perhaps because we are too close for clear analysis, all the presidents are in the middle of the pack, except for uniform low rankings for G.W. Bush.

These waves of good and bad are interesting, but for this blog the question is how have Republicans and Democrats been ranked as leaders of the US? Although there are always concerns of bias, patterns are clear. Looking at ranking by all 16 polls included in the Wikipedia summary, 72% of the Democratic presidents are ranked in the top 50% - above average, and 71% of Republicans are ranked in the bottom 50%, below average.

I have heard conservatives claim that presidential rankings are skewed because so many academics are liberal, so I looked at the 1982 rankings that were separately tabulated according to the self-professed conservative or liberal leanings of the 240 historians who did the rankings. The remarkable result is that most of the rankings agree. The best presidents are Democrats, say 75% of the liberal historians and 62% of the conservative ones. And the worse presidents are overwhelmingly Republican (71% according to liberals and 66% according to conservatives).

With these data, Democrats have been better presidents than Republicans by quite large margins.