In another indication of the partisan bent of modern academia, a recent survey of scholars on the American presidency, performed at two U.S. universities and subsequently published, is gaining attention for its questionable and controversial results.
The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey, led by Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston and Justin S. Vaughn of Coastal Carolina University, surveyed experts at the American Political Science Association, as well as scholars who had recently published peer-reviewed academic research on the U.S. presidency.
The survey has current President Joe Biden as the 14th greatest president in American history. His predecessor, President Donald J. Trump, is ranked dead last.
Biden was ranked ahead of Woodrow Wilson, Ronald Reagan, and Ulysses S. Grant. Former President Barack Obama was placed seventh, up eight points from last year’s survey.
Trump scored the survey’s lowest ranking of 45, trailing James Buchanan at 44th, Andrew Johnson at 43rd, Franklin Pierce at 42nd, and William Henry Harrison at 41st.
Abraham Lincoln was selected by the scholars as America’s best president.
The poll also ranked respondents’ party and ideological differences, but the surveyors claimed it did not “tend to make a major difference overall.”
However, there was a clear party divide in the ranks for Obama and Biden, with Democrats putting them 6th and 13th on average, while Republicans placed them 15th and 30th, respectively.
The presidential rankings are notable for their lack of objective measurement for Americans’ quality of life under a given president, and appear to be ranked according to how a president’s ideological disposition matches those of typically left-wing political scholars.
The Biden presidency and the Trump presidency represent a major political litmus test for the ability of scholars to assess elected leaders based on objective merits.
Donald Trump’s economy, up until the moment state governors began locking down under the Covid pandemic, was one of the best in modern history.
As Atlantic scholar Derek Thompson summarized in August 2019:
- Jobs have grown for 106 consecutive months, the longest streak on record.
- At 121 months, this is the longest bull market in American history.
- The unemployment rate has been at 4 percent or less for 16 consecutive months, the longest such streak in 50 years.
- Inequality remains a crucial problem, but wages are now growing the fastest among the lowest-wage industries, thanks to state-by-state increases in the minimum wage and the effects of low unemployment.
- The University of Michigan’s consumer-sentiment index, which peaked at 112 in 1999, has hovered above 90 for more than four years, something that hasn’t happened since the 1990s.
- Latino unemployment has fallen to its lowest rate on record.
- Black unemployment, too, has fallen to its lowest rate on record, and, as the investor and Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen points out, the unemployment rate for black teenagers, which peaked at 48.9 percent in 2010, has plunged to yet another record low in 2019.
The United States was also kept out of foreign wars, which were sparse on Donald Trump’s watch. The Trump presidency brokered peace deals in the Middle East and successfully promoted deterrence through a ‘peace through strength’ approach.
In addition, the 45th president secured the southern border, preventing the human catastrophe and widespread national disruption of a full-blown border crisis.
The Biden presidency has witnessed a massive spike in inflation, a surge in energy prices, rampant spending fraught with waste and corruption, reckless brinksmanship and foreign interventionism, and a border crisis that has exploded out-of-control.
Biden’s presidency has been one of the most chaotic and controversial in American history.
- The Department of Justice on his watch has politically prosecuted a former president, raising major questions about corrupt weaponization of the agency.
- Biden’s family has been thoroughly exposed as having participated in multiple foreign influence peddling schemes with the aiding and abetting of Joe Biden.
- His administration has pursued unconstitutional censorship and surveillance of the American people.
It has been a disaster for the rule of law and for the social contract with the federal government as stipulated by the U.S. Constitution.
The quality of life for the vast majority of Americans was much better under the Trump presidency than the Biden presidency. The Trump presidency gets zero credit from scholars for it, while they give Joe Biden maximum credit for simply being a Democratic president.
Academia is broken. This presidential survey is yet another example of how modern scholars are completely out-of-touch with the interests of the American people.
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