In my previous post in this series I advocated for creating, ahead of elections, scorecards with a moderate number of categories (on which we can almost all agree). Then each voter should (a) weight the categories according to their own preferences, (b) score the candidates according to the information they can reasonably guess, and (c) decide which candidate they most prefer. Step (b) can be difficult, and step (a) will require introspection and is necessarily approximate, but most of the time we are not faced with a large number of candidates whose scores will be very close, so step (c) should be doable in most cases. I started with the 10 categories of presidential performance from the 2021 C-Span survey discussed in my last post,

In this post I want to think in more detail about some of the categories.  iIt seems to me that  most of them make sense. Most seem fairly easy to interpret: for example, Public Persuasion entails good speechwriters, delivery of speeches, how press briefings are handled, etc.  There are two categories that I think need more thought: Economic Management and Moral Authority. Many voters say they use perceptions of the “state of the economy” as a major input to their voting decision (i.e. this category has high weight for them), so it is worth exploring this in more detail.

The White House website has a good summary of what the job of President of the US entails. It is a very substantial role: head of state, responsible for negotiations with foreign governments; head of the executive branch, ultimately responsible for executing the laws passed by Congress and staffing a vast array of federal agencies for that purpose; Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. The role has expanded overall since the time of George Washington, as the federal government has become more influential relative to the states.

Incidentally, many countries have presidents that do only  a fraction of the first of the three roles above, and many others have none at all (for example, they have a monarch who is head of state, and head of government is the Prime Minister, who is elected by Parliament/Congress to that role). Although the President is not strictly speaking directly elected, because of the Electoral College, the President is clearly the closest thing in the US system to a representative of all the voters (at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, several other suggestions were advanced by the founders of the republic, and 15 years later the 12th Amendment to the Constitution was needed, to clarify the relation between President and Vice-President).

The President also has some soft power to focus attention on issues and set a political agenda, using their access to the news media and status as representative of the people to try to influence Congress,  which is responsible for the legislation that is necessary for  lasting change. Major changes usually require the president’s party to control Congress. On the other hand, the President clearly has short-term, but not necessarily long-term influence, through vetoing ro threatening to veto Congressional legislation, issuing executive orders, and taking actions during fast-moving crises (not just wars, although these obviously count). Congress and/or the courts can overturn or limit the effect of such decisions eventually.

The president has relatively little direct influence on macroeconomic indicators. For example, In most countries, monetary policy has a major impact on overall economic performance. The Federal Reserve System was created in 1913 by Congress to oversee the banking industry and keep some control over inflation, unemployment and interest rates. Its role has expanded, and its decisions on, say, interest rates, are independently made (interestingly, although it must report to Congress regularly, it is not even funded by Congressional appropriation, but runs primarily on “interest on government securities that it has acquired through open market operations” – it makes close to $100B annually of which about 98% is returned to the US Treasury after paying for FRB operations). Members of the Board of Governors have 14 year terms. So the  President, who does propose board members  to the Senate but cannot appoint them anyway, clearly has very limited influence on interest rates in the short term. Fiscal (tax and spending) policy is another main area of influence of government on the economy, and presidents often have plans, but Congress must pass the relevant laws, and in any case it takes considerable time for the effects of law changes to become apparent.

It is widely believed by experts that voters place too much emphasis on macroeconomic indicators in presidential elections (for example, see this NYT article from 2017). Therefore this category should have relatively little weight in our decision-making, or we need a more subtle interpretation of what Economic Management means. The President is responsible for appointing (subject to Congress’s approval) officials such as the Secretary of the Treasury (essentially the CFO of the federal government), and pushing a policy agenda in areas such as health care, education, and infrastructure, but plans in these areas all take a long time to bear fruit (rotten or otherwise). How economic crises are handled may be an area in which the President is important. Interestingly, although the causes are not fully understood, Democratic presidential administrations apparently have been much more successful at economic management than Republicans over many decades, and have had to deal with more crises. This is worth pointing out, because opinion polls often show that voters believe that Republicans are better at economic stewardship.

Moral Authority is an interesting category, and it is also  unclear what it should mean. For me, a high score in this category should be associated with a high level of ethics and integrity as applied to the job of President (for example, trying to overturn the result of a legitimate  election or demanding that appointees put loyalty to the President above loyalty to the country seem bad practices). Private life should be mostly off limits. The highly partisan reaction to scandals in the private life of Clinton and Trump, for example, shows that overall we find it hard to draw the line (in any case, there is always the argument that someone holding such a position should be seen to be above reproach, to avoid being blackmailed or losing the faith of the public). Given the difficult decisions that must be made by presidents, it is probably asking too much for them to be paragons of virtue (this article is worth reading).

After fleshing out what each of the categories means to us, we will have a good approximate scorecard, complete with approximate weights for the categories. But how will we fill out the scorecard for a given candidate? I will discuss this further soon.

Something that really annoys me about how politics is covered (in my experience) in traditional and social media is that so much effort is wasted because of a lack of agreement on definitions and overall goals. I don’t for a moment think that if we could just all understand each other, there would be no need for argument – it is clear that different people place very different importance on various issues. But not even understanding the main issues, and talking past each other, is really suboptimal, so let’s all stop it. It would be hard enough if we only had to find a way  to reconcile our various preferences in a sustainably fair way – adding a lot of noise and unnecessary emotion makes it very, very much harder. This is a topic that will recur throughout these posts.

I start today by noting the current extreme level of disagreement about whether Joe Biden or Donald Trump have done a good job as President of the USA. Some of what I read online is intellectually laughable – it is not credible that each is the devil incarnate with no redeeming features. But even the better quality stuff is guilty of cherry-picking, and focusing on specific points without context. A much better approach, I believe, is to decide beforehand what are the qualities that a good president should have. This is analogous to thoroughly thinking through a job description before it comes to interviews, so as to increase the chance of a good decision that is not overly influenced by biases or a fluke performance by the candidate. It is true that the long presidential campaign weeds out many candidates who are by definition not optimal for presidential campaigning. But it is far from clear that the qualities needed to campaign well are well correlated with those needed to do the job once elected. It falls to the voters, who in this analogy are the hiring committee, to do a better job of evaluation. As a start, I propose a systematic use of scorecards, informed by knowledge gained by presidential historians.

The C-SPAN Presidential Historians Survey has been run several times (see the 2021 results). Whether we agree or not with the scores (which are averages of scores given by around 100 professional observers of presidential history), they have at least tried to list 10 categories, which they weight equally, and then scored each president on each category. The categories (deliberately not defined) are: Public Persuasion, Crisis Leadership, Economic Management, Moral Authority, International Relations, Administrative Skills, Relations with Congress, Vision/Setting an Agenda, Pursued Equal Justice for All and Performance Within the Context of the Times.  Let’s start with these, realizing that presidents often get too much credit for things that go well, and too much blame for things that go badly. Of course, it is not always clear how a candidate with no track record as president will perform in each category, but we can make educated guesses in some cases (in 2024 the two main candidates each have a track record in any case).

Trump is ranked near the bottom in most categories, and the scores mostly seem reasonable to me. Treating the categories in descending order of score: Public Persuasion (43.6; he is known to be very persuasive to some people, but is quite polarizing and many do not trust what he says), Economic Management (42.6; the stock market indices were high during his presidency, interest rates were low, but many claimed that his policies were irresponsible and unsustainable – many people would rate him higher), Vision/Setting an Agenda (39.6; I would rate him higher because he did seem to have clear agenda when campaigning but his lack of focus was always clear – for example, what was the plan with North Korea, really?), International Relations (33.3, he alienated many allies and was too transactional for my liking, though some said his unpredictable style would deter aggressors – I thought his approach to Kim Jong Un was worth a try, but execution is important), Relations with Congress (28.6; he didn’t achieve much with majorities for his party in both houses), Performance Within Context of Times (28.3), Pursued Equal Justice for All (27.6, it did not seem to be a priority for him), Crisis Leadership (was way too late in taking COVID seriously and didn’t have a consistent message), Administrative Skills (22.8, many appointees attested to his lack of engagement with details or ability to deal with them; he is rumored to have ADHD, and appears to prefer appointees who agree with him on everything). Overall, his highest ranked category is still only ranked 32nd out of 44.

Turning to Biden (who is obviously not rated in the survey), it seems to me that his lowest scores would probably be in Public Persuasion (he is not a fine orator, and many say that his way of speaking does not inspire confidence, but I would still rate him no worse than George W. Bush, who scored higher than Trump) and Vision/Setting an Agenda (he does seem to have one, but somehow it is not coming across as clearly as it should – but he should be higher than the famously vision-challenged George HW Bush, who scored 48.0). In every other category, it seems pretty clear to me that Biden has performed above average. For example, he has had to deal with COVID, Ukraine and Gaza crises already, has fierce opposition in Congress, and still managed to get substantial legislation passed to support his basic agenda. If one believes that the Mexico/US border is a huge crisis and he has failed, that would lower his score on Crisis Management (my own opinion is that it is a long-running issue with plenty of blame to go around). On International Relations, he has restored relations with NATO and led support for Ukraine, for example, and has a lot of experience in the area. On Economic Management, the macroeconomic trends have been good for a long time now. It will be interesting to see how he is remembered decades from now. I suspect his reputation will continue to improve over time (although I guess if he loses to Trump he will be heavily criticized). If he stopped being president right now, I think history would likely judge him rather favorably based on his record.

As I write on Presidents’ Day 2024, I have just seen results of another survey from late 2023 (Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey). The respondents were over 100 professional researchers in political science focusing on the presidency, and each submitted a simple rating between 0 and 100, without any category breakdown. Interestingly, respondents self-reported their party affiliation (Republican/Democratic/Independent) and ideological stance (Conservative/Liberal/Moderate). Even more interestingly, Biden was ranked between 13th and 30th by every subgroup, and in the 10 most underrated presidents, whereas Trump was ranked 41st by Republicans, 43rd by Conservatives, and 45th (last) by the other four subgroups.

It seems clear enough that unless a voter has a rather unusual weighting of the criteria discussed above, or rejects the entire premise of the study, or just wants to troll, create chaos or act out emotionally  (in which case they should think about the Leopard Eating Faces Party), that they will prefer Biden’s record over Trump’s. For the forthcoming election there is also the issue of what we expect their second term to look like,  but that is a multifaceted topic for another post.