If the presidents of the United States were chosen by historians, Donald Trump would not have much chance of returning to the White House after the presidential elections on November 5.
This is what the academics, historians and experts who have voted in the third edition of a survey promoted by professors Brandon Rottinghaus, from the University of Houston, and Justin S. Vaughn, from Coastal Carolina University, consider it.
The survey places the current occupant of the White House, Joe Biden, as 14th in the ranking of 45 presidents.
Rottinghaus and Vaughn have launched what they have called the Presidential Greatness Project, the highlight of which is this survey of experts.
Still, participation is low: 525 respondents were invited to participate and 154 usable responses were received, yielding a response rate of 29.3%.
Respondents included current and recent members of the Presidents and Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is the leading organization of social science experts on presidential politics, as well as scholars who had recently published peer-reviewed research. in academic magazines and press.
Historians and political scientists are asked to rate presidents from 0 to 100, where 0 is failure and 100 is greatness.
The results of the ranking are quite similar to those of previous surveys, published in 2015 and 2018. Abraham Lincoln once again heads the list (95.03 on average), followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (90.83), George Washington (90 .32), Theodore Roosevelt (78.58), Thomas Jefferson (77.53), Harry Truman (75.34), Barack Obama (73.8) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (73.73).
Franklin Delano Roosevelt has moved from third to second place.
Except for him, who was president precisely when the monument was sculpted, the other four presidents who top the list are those who appear on Mount Rushmore, in South Dakota.
Donald Trump is the worst rated (10.92) by experts, behind James Buchanan (16.71), the president before the outbreak of the Civil War.
Although those who answered the survey have a certain progressive bias, there is a good consensus that Trump was a terrible leader.
By partisan affiliation, both Democratic and independent historians consider him the worst president, while Republicans place him in 41st place, leaving Buchanan in last place.
Something similar occurs in terms of the ideology of those surveyed: experts who identify themselves as progressive or moderate place him last and those who define themselves as conservative place him in 43rd place out of the 45 presidents, again with Buchanan at the tail end. .
Biden enters the ranking in 14th place, with 62.66 points, behind John F. Kennedy (10th) and recent Democrats Barack Obama (7th) and Bill Clinton (12th), but ahead of recent Republicans Ronald Reagan (16th), George HW Bush (19th), George W. Bush (32nd) and Donald Trump (45th).
Biden's good position is due precisely, in large part, to the fact that he kicked Trump out of the White House.
“Biden's most important accomplishments may be that he rescued the presidency [from] Trump, returned to a more traditional style of presidential leadership, and is preparing to keep the office out of the hands of his predecessor this fall,” say the authors of the survey in an article published in the
Los Angeles Times.
The opinion of political scientists and historians is, however, very different from that indicated by surveys carried out among the general population and which give Biden the lowest approval rating for a president since Jimmy Carter.
Furthermore, his age (81) and mental acuity have become causes of concern, even for supporters of his own party.
Biden and Trump are the most likely candidates for next November's presidential elections by the two major parties.
Most polls give Trump an advantage for now, both in the popular vote of the country as a whole and in the decisive states.
It is unclear what role Trump's indictments and trials may have in the campaign.
So far, the court cases have favored him among the base of the Republican Party and Trump seems shot to achieve the nomination in the primaries.
More uncertain is the effect that seeing him sitting in the dock or a hypothetical conviction may have, especially among independent, moderate and undecided voters.
Republicans and conservatives consider George Washington the best president, ahead of Lincoln, a favorite of Democrats, independents, progressives and moderates.
There is a great difference of opinion based on ideology about many of the recent presidents (Reagan, George HW Bush, Obama and Biden).
In the case of the current president, the Democrats place him in 13th place;
the independents, in 19th;
and the Republicans, in 30th.
“In the first post-Trump poll, we saw a significant rebound of recent Democratic presidents, each of whom rose in the rankings, while each of the recent Republican presidents fell, with the exception of President Trump, who remained at the bottom of the rankings,” Vaughn said in a statement released by the University of Houston.
“As scholars reassess the impact of the modern presidency from administrative and cultural standpoints, we see significant changes over time in what constitutes presidential greatness,” Rottinghaus said.
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