The Relative Performance of the Economy under the Presidents of the United States from 1900 to 2024

Samuel Williamson, MeasuringWorth & Miami University

Economic performance has been an important issue in elections for decades. Voters look at economic variables to gain some insight into the incumbent's record. The health of our economy, however, is determined by monetary and fiscal policy, external shocks, and even bubbles. The economy faced by an incumbent president and Congress, good or bad, is the result of events that occurred before as well as during his term of office. Elections have been won and lost by the timing of the business cycle where incumbents were caught on the right or wrong side of the slope. Of course, this does not stop claims and blames during election campaigns. Some are rhetorical, such as "the best economy ever" or "you are worse off than you were two or four years ago." Others are specific such as "your taxes are higher today than they were" or "the unemployment rate fell last month." In many cases, these statements have little context or are misleading. For example, taxes may be higher than four years ago, but at that time, there may have been a one time rebate to deal with a recession. The unemployment rate may have fallen but from an unusually high rate. The goal of this paper is to help the reader better understand how the economy performed during each of the presidential terms from 1900 to 2024. It has been updated in the February of 2025, so that data from the Biden term are complete. For all the Presidents in the 21st century we also present the performances during the first three years of their terms. This is done so the comparisons of Trumps’ performance with others can also be made excluding his last year in office when there was a 9% drop in real GDP during the Covid epidemic.

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 Presented in Session 136. Economic Growth and Sovereignty