Former US President and GOP nominee hopeful Donald Trump has always been skilled at getting himself to stand out.
However, a new academic poll is shining a spotlight on a stage even the animated showman Donald Trump might not want to bask in.
This poll, called the “Presidential Greatness Project,” surveyed academic scholars across a multitude of disciplines. The criteria for being surveyed demanded presidential politics must intersect with the scholars’ work in some fashion. Its authors were Brandon Rottinghaus, a University of Houston political science professor, and Justin Vaughn, a Coastal Carolina University political science professor.
The survey received 154 useable responses out of 525 total invitations that ranked all 45 current and former US presidents starting with George Washington and ending with Joe Biden. It is the third such installment of this poll, with previous iterations published in 2015 and 2018. The poll used a scale between 0 and 100 and asked those who delivered survey responses to use this ranking for each US president.
On the scale, 0 is the low end meaning the president is considered a failure. On the high end, a score of 100 means the president is great. Donald Trump managed to find himself with the lowest score of any US president, 10.92/100. This places him firmly at the bottom of the rankings, with every other president maintaining a higher average score than him.
In the second iteration of this poll, Trump also had the lowest average score. The first time the poll was released was in 2015, so Trump didn’t have the chance to be included in the rankings yet. This latest iteration being released in 2024 makes it the first one in a “post-trump” presidency.
Trump also earned a distinction as the “most polarising” president on the poll. He was identified as the most polarizing president 170 times, which puts him heads and shoulders above the rest of the presidents. The next closest president, Andrew Jackson, was only identified as polarizing 74 times.
Abraham Lincoln scored first place in the poll with a 95.03 average score among scholars. Next is Franklin Delano Roosevelt in second place with 90.83. The first United States president, George Washington, is third in this poll with an average score of 90.32.
Notably, current US President Joe Biden managed to secure a ranking in the top 20 of United States presidents. Biden had an average score of 62.66, placing him 14th.
Rottinghaus and Vaughn speculated that Biden’s relatively high ranking might be correlated with his explicit opposition to Trump.
In a piece for the Los Angeles Times, they wrote “Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall.”
Academics were able to disclose their political leanings on the survey, which led to some surprising results. Even among Republican scholars, Trump only managed to rank 41 out of 45. Republican scholars also ranked Joe Biden at 30th. This is significantly above where they placed Trump, a president who shares their political party affiliation.
Vaughn and Rottinghaus acknowledge that academics tend to be left-leaning, but feel the data offers valuable insight into the mindset of scholars and those who study presidents.
“Academics do lean left, but that hasn’t changed since our previous surveys. What these results suggest is not just an added emphasis on a president’s political affiliation, but also the emergence of a president’s fealty to political and institutional norms as a criterion for what makes a president “great” to the scholars who study them,” they said. (via Los Angeles Times)
