Which Party Has The Better Track Record With The Economy?
By Brock Munsey
Are Republican or Democratic presidents generally better with the U.S. economy? It’s an interesting question that brings out strong opinions from either side, but top economists have already tried to answer this question from an entirely fact based approach.
The American Economic Review is a non-profit, non-partisan, peer reviewed academic journal established in 1911. In 2016 it contained a report done by two professors of economics at Princeton University which asked the question, does the U.S. economy perform better under democratic or republican presidents? According to the report, “The answer, while hardly a secret, is not nearly as widely known as it should be. The US economy performs much better when a Democrat is president than when a Republican is” (Blinder & Watson). It is very important to note that there are almost infinite other factors besides presidential party affiliation to consider when looking at the economy of the United States. Blinder & Watson do even state that luck is a large (if not the largest) factor in determining how a president will affect the economy.
The Joint Economic Committee was established in 1944 and is a senate committee deemed responsible for reporting the economic condition of the United States. An article published by the committee in October of 2024 was titled, The U.S. Economy Performs Better Under Democratic Presidents. They included specific details about what metrics they were using to determine this, such as:
Looking at the last seven presidents, job growth totaled over 50 million under Democratic presidents compared to only 17 million under Republican presidents… the unemployment rate was lower at the end of the presidency for all three Democrats and only one Republican (Ronald Reagan), while it was higher for the other three Republicans (senate.gov).
They also mentioned that there have been 11 recessions that have occurred in the post World War II era U.S. and 10 of them have happened under a Republican president.
It’s important to contextualize that these results aren’t just coming from piling up U.S. debt to stimulate the economy either. As the article pointed out, “Twice as much was added to the national debt under President Trump as under President Biden” (senate.gov).
To take a broad synthesis of different sources I asked Google AI the question, “Does the economy do better under Democrats or Republicans?” Even as much as artificial intelligence is trained to not give simple yes or no answers, my query was still met with the response, “Historical data suggests that the U.S. economy has performed better on average under Democratic presidents compared to Republican presidents since World War II, according to various analyses” (google.com).
If you don’t feel that Democratic presidents have done a better job with the U.S. economy than Republican ones, I do encourage anyone reading this to research the topic and try to come to another conclusion.
Image courtesy of Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_presidential_party