Compared to most other countries, the US has very unusual political parties. The electoral system predates political parties. The founders of the republic apparently had a view of democracy that was local and based on individual candidates, which reflects to some extent the economic and social environment before the Industrial Revolution. Famously, they warned against parties (“factions”) and designed the US system to be decentralized and to have high inertia, in order to guard against hasty decisions made under the influence of “the turbulency and weakness of unruly passions”.

Party membership figures show that the two main US parties have hugely many members as a fraction of the population than parties in other countries. However, membership is the US is a simple affair, requiring only self-reporting, and crucially it does not require payment (for example in UK the major parties have (paid) memberships totaling around 1% of the population, while in the US the numbers are more like 20-25%. Perhaps not surprisingly, parties have very little power over their members in the US, and they are basically run at the state level, although the national committees deal with fundraising and presidential campaigns.

Perhaps more surprisingly, the parties have little power over their own elected representatives. The two large parties consist of large coalitions spanning a large ideological range, and under different historical circumstances would likely be replaced by more coherent parties (e.g. the Trumpists, Clintonists, Warrenists, Romneyists). Explanations why two-party dominance persists in the US when it is so uncommon around the world include the use of plurality voting in single-member districts, gerrymandering and the ability of large parties to constrain the ballot access of smaller ones, but I will not discuss that further in this post. The point is that it is not clear what policies parties actually stand for, and whether they will be able to carry them out even if they win a majority in the House of representatives, Senate, etc. The “whip” system used in parliamentary systems to enforce party-line voting is very much weaker in the US.

In recent years public approval of Congress has plummeted, as partisan gridlock seems to have taken over. Party members may not agree with each other on much (as the recent difficulty of passing aid for Ukraine in the House of Representatives showed) but they are basically united on the fact that members of the other party are bad and should not be given any power. The way that the aid package was passed has been portrayed as exceptionally rare, when in the end it came down to individual pieces that each had a strong majority of support both in the house and in opinion polls. It is hard to see how the party system has been helpful in such cases.

What is the point of political parties at all? They are almost ubiquitous worldwide, and apparently there are many theories as to why. Parties do allow for simplification when it comes to elections for legislative chambers: voters have a smaller number of different policy platforms and ideologies to consider, and have some idea how their representative will work together with representatives from other districts. Why presidential elections are party-based in the US is less clear, but presumably the vast amounts of money and logistical effort required to be elected mean that large national organizations have an advantage.

Coherence in terms of policy and ideology is likely the main point of parties, which makes the dominance of parties in the US very strange. Not only does the label Democrat or Republican convey less information and certainty than an equivalent label in most other countries, these labels are used essentially everywhere. In New Zealand, local elections (for mayor, city council, etc) are mostly not associated (in terms of labels) with national political parties, and there are many independent candidates and local parties. In the US, there are local and state parties but almost every elected office will have Democrat and Republican candidates, even for posts such as Secretary of State, Attorney General or State Auditor, that ought to be nonpartisan and in many places will not even be elected positions.

Overall it seems to me that the US has too few big parties, too many elections for offices in which parties are involved, and yet too little discipline and coherence in the parties to make having them very useful. I don’t yet know how many people agree with me, or what can be done about it.

Life is far too short to read even a small fraction of everything written about these elections. Here is a list of sources that I have found helpful, and which I hope will be helpful for others.

• A Different Democracy (by Taylor, Shugart, Lijphart, Grofman) is a book by well-known political scientists that looks at American exceptionalism when it comes to elections and electoral systems by comparison with 30 other countries. It will be particularly valuable for Americans who haven’t seriously thought about how other countries elect representatives.
• Making Democracy Count (by Ismar Volic), published this month,  is  aimed at a wider audience than the previous book. It aims to explain how mathematics underlies every aspect of electoral system design, and how we might improve the current system.
• Wikipedia is a startlingly useful resource for almost any topic that is not controversial.  The articles related to US politics contain a wealth of information. One could start here for an overview. Almost any topic I have thought of while writing these blog posts has had useful information on Wikipedia.
• For fact-checking of claims by politicians, and an accounting of progress on campaign promises, Politifact is a good basic resource.
• Unbiased and useful news about politics is tricky to obtain. There is too much emphasis on the “horse race” aspects of which candidate or party is winning, and not enough on information to allow voters to make a clear comparison between candidates. The standard advice to read widely and take bias into account is still good. I have not used the aggregator websites such as Real Clear Politics and  Politico, but they may be an efficient way to find content. I have mostly read New York Times, Washington Post and Guardian.

First-mover advantage is a concept seen in business schools. Sometimes, the first firm to enter a particular segment of the market accumulates a large name recognition and market share, and out-competes newcomers. However, there are obvious disadvantages to moving first: subsequent firms can save on research and development and on marketing costs by exploiting the work done by the first mover.  If it is relatively easy to imitate other firms, and the first mover does not gain important knowledge with its extra experience, the pioneering firm may be overtaken.

In the “marketplace of ideas”, the barrier to entry by imitators and followers, is low, by design. The first person to discover a new idea in science is often not the person who is most associated by the public with that idea  (this observation is called Stigler’s law ). Although there are plenty of examples where well-known scientists got credit for the work of others, thus becoming even more famous (the Matthew effect ), new and improved ideas do break through very often – because over 5 million papers are published per year, this is not surprising. Even if the wrong people get the credit, in some sense, the overall system still functions fairly well.

However, one situation in which  first-mover disadvantage occurs, and the consequences are borne by more than just the inventor, is when an agreed standard must be designed for a society, and changing it is hard. Such questions as whether we should drive on the left or right side of the road cannot be left up to individuals. In this case, the choice is basically arbitrary, and eventually whole continents and islands adopt the same side (the switch from left to right by Sweden in 1967 was quite late, and worth reading about). Sometimes, making a choice early can lock us into a suboptimal situation.

Another example is the voltage for consumer electricity supply. After the War of the Currents (as an aside, the movie with Benedict Cumberbatch as Edison is interesting) was settled in favor of AC power, the question of what residential voltage to use still remained. In the USA and Canada, which were at the forefront of development, 110V was decided on. Once the decision is made, changing it would be very difficult. Many other countries, making the decision later, ended up using 240V, which is more efficient in terms of power losses (interestingly, these are not the only voltages used worldwide but the US is near the low end).

A more relevant example for this series is the design of the electoral system. Although some choices were made as a result of compromises and were probably known not to be good at the time, the United States Constitution is, overall, a very impressive piece of work. The designers knew what they didn’t want (tyrannical and capricious monarchs), but had very little precedent to follow.  They were not seeking timeless perfection. Thomas Jefferson  clearly believed that laws, including the Constitution, should be amended often (as a rule of thumb, every 19 years!). Nevertheless, the procedure for amending major laws is, and ought to be, fairly difficult. There have been 33 amendments proposed to the original US Constitution. Of these, 27 have been ratified but many were done (including the Bill of Rights, which constitutes the first ten amendments) within the first few years, and none proposed after 1971 has so far been ratified. The list of unratified amendments includes some interesting ones, including one to prohibit child labor, one to strip US citizenship from anyone who accepts a title of nobility, and the famous Equal Rights (for women) Amendment.

Article I of the Constitution already specifies that elections for the House of Representatives be held every 2 years (which is very short by world standards – in fact it seems only Micronesia has such a short term, while 4 or 5 years are far more common) and that senatorial terms should be 6 years. It also gives the states broad rights to conduct elections. Article II discusses the Electoral College (which will be the subject of another post). Several amendments have been passed to loosen the rules for eligibility of voters and restrict them for candidates, but to my knowledge there is no more discussion about elections in the Constitution.

Given the historical period, the size of the country and the experience of the architects of the US government, it makes sense that they would think of voting as synonymous with dividing each state into geographical districts and electing a single member by plurality (each voter votes for one candidate, and the winner is the candidate with the most votes – of course, some form of tiebreaking method is needed). However, although this has been the most common method, some states did it differently. For example, New Mexico had two representatives for several decades, elected from a single statewide district. The Apportionment Act of 1911 required states to use single-member geographic districts of nearly equal population, but this expired and “at-large” voting was again legal from 1929, as was using districts of wildly different sizes. Finally in 1967 Congress passed a law restoring the 1911 rules. An important stated reason was to ensure that racial minorities had some chance of representation, and that other minorities, for example rural voters, did not have excessive influence.

It seems obvious now that this action  “threw the baby out with the bathwater”. It would have required some effort to craft a law that ruled out undesirable outcomes without being so prescriptive, but it seems a great shame that the effort was not made, or has not been made since. Many other countries have elected multiple members from districts (for example using some form of proportional representation or single transferable vote) in a way that seems to be broadly popular and allows for minority interests to have their proper weight. The United States, in addition to having first-mover disadvantage in some areas, also seems to have a strong inertia (how many serious countries still use currency as impractical as the one cent coin or dollar bill?). Yet the federated nature of the country allows for experiments in the states. Why so few have been made or allowed is something of a mystery to me.

Alexander Hamilton, writing in the Federalist paper 68 (The Mode of Electing the President), says, when explaining the use of presidential electors, “It was also peculiarly desirable to afford as little opportunity as possible to tumult and disorder.” The peaceful transition of power was a very unusual concept in those days: historically, almost all political leaders were not even elected, and ceased being leaders only because of natural death, homicide, or defeat in battle.

The overwhelming majority of presidential elections have led to peaceful and uncontroversial transition of power. The few really contentious elections, such as those of 1800 and 1876, where  the eventual winner was not determined until much later than usual, still saw an orderly transition to the new administration. The 2020 election, as we all know, was exceptional – not only was there substantial violence in an attempt to interfere  with certification of the election, but extremely unusual behavior from the outgoing president, including a concerted legal campaign to contest election results, and repeated unsubstantiated claims of election fraud.

Despite the mostly peaceful treatment by rivals, being President of the United States of America is a dangerous occupation. The list of assassination plots (4 of which have been successful and 2 of which caused injuries to the president) is long. Among other incidents, Truman was certainly in serious danger in 1950. Several plots (for example against Hoover and F.D. Roosevelt) occurred after the election but before the president had been sworn in, during the presidential transition period.  The list of would-be assassins is varied: in addition to those who were simply mentally ill, alleged motivations include white supremacy, anarchism, Puerto Rican independence, and Zionism. A poignant note: Robert Todd Lincoln, eldest son of Abraham, was present (being Secretary of War) when James Garfield was killed in 1881. Note that in addition to the 4 deaths by homicide, 4 presidents have died of natural causes during the presidency, including Zachary Taylor who apparently contracted a gastrointestinal infection from food or water. This gives a death rate of 15-20% for presidents in office.

Members of Congress have a much better survival rate, but even so there is (compared to other long-established democracies) a remarkable number of them who have been killed and wounded. These include the infamous assault in 1856 on Charles Sumner by another member of Congress who objected to Sumner’s anti-slavery speech. Other politicians are also not exempt, as this list shows. Of course, these are extremes, and there are many more threats to government officials made than are carried out.

There has been a large increase in the last decade in threats, doxing, swatting, and other practices intend to intimidate public officials, along with inflammatory language and stochastic terrorism. As I write, opinion polls (e.g. see stories here , here, here) show that a large fraction of potential voters are concerned about the prospect of political violence.

The causes of this uptick in political violence appear to center around (largely erroneous) beliefs that a political party or its nominees (and in recent years we are talking almost exclusively about the Republicans) are being unjustly or corruptly denied their political rights, together with tribal feelings of being out-competed or supplanted by other tribes. The US has seen this before in the 19th century (see this article for a detailed analysis of the current situation in historical context). The four main factors, according to the above article, that promote election violence are 1) a highly competitive election that could shift the balance of power; 2) partisan division based on identity; 3) electoral rules that enable winning by exploiting identity cleavages; and 4) weak institutional constraints on violence. Of course, many countries worldwide have seen political violence in the last few decades, but among advanced industrialized democracies, it has been relatively rare and often perpetrated by extremist outsiders. The disquieting new feature is that major parties such as the Republican Party are implicitly or explicitly accepting political violence and normalizing it, so that it is no longer a tactic used by frustrated and mentally disturbed lone wolves.

It seems clear to me that the state and public must fight back against this trend. We have seen how allowing political violence has played out in fairly recent history, for example in Europe in the 1930s. Not only should law enforcement be more stringent when dealing with individuals and small conspiracies, political actors should be demanding higher standards of politicians and their parties. I find it hard to understand how a candidate who refuses to accept the legitimacy of the 2020 elections, for example (noting that they have been widely regarded as the most secure in history), can be credible to any voter. But if that candidate refuses to a priori rule out political violence should they fail to win, in my view they should be disqualified from candidacy Amendment 14, Section 3 of the US Constitution bars those who engaged in insurrection from various public offices: what constitutes insurrection and who decides has been recently discussed in the Supreme Court, with an unsatisfying answer obtained for now (the states can’t decide). But engaging in insurrection is a very serious act – surely it must be possible to be disqualified for threatening to engage in insurrection, or to cancel elections once elected, etc. I am not a legal scholar, and the First Amendment presumably allows more latitude in the US than many other countries, but I would really like to know whether disqualification of candidates or parties on the basis of their clear threat to the democratic system is possible.

One of the strangest features of the US electoral system to a newcomer is the lack of competition. The culture of the country in general has been strongly shaped by ideas of free market in goods and services, and its research universities and liberal art colleges have over many decades strongly supported the “marketplace of ideas”. The US has been a magnet for centuries for people with a desire to create a better life, often by working very hard and competing for resources. Why then is real political competition so difficult to find?

An obvious feature of the US political landscape is the dominance of just two parties. Even though in theory we could see candidates of parties other than the Democratic or Republican parties win seats in congress or in the US senate, this is very rare, and in presidential elections it is very unusual for a “third party” to win more than 5% of the popular vote even a single state in the Electoral College. More common, though still rare, is a candidate winning as an independent. It seems to be very hard for a new party to establish itself, and it seems that an existing party has to achieve severe dysfunction before it it is seriously challenged. The Republican Party, for example, was founded in 1854 after the collapse of the Whig Party over the issue of slavery. In recent years it has changed its policy outlook and “brand” dramatically, which in other countries might lead to a split or improved showing by another party, but so far we have not seen either of these happen.

My main point here is not to explore in detail the reasons for two-party dominance (the US ranks low among the major democracies in the effective number of parties). I strongly recommend the book A Different Democracy (by Taylor, Shugart, Lijphart and Grofman) for discussion of this and many other questions on why the US is so different from other countries. Briefly, some main reasons appear to be the plurality “first past the post” system of voting and the amount of resources needed to mount effective campaigns.

A related and unusual feature of  US politics is how hard it is for incumbents to be defeated. The reelection rate for the US House of Representatives is well over 90%, and that for the Senate  is not much less. Some reasons for this appear to be higher name recognition of incumbents, them having more campaign money, and partisan gerrymandering. The two-year term of members of the House of Representatives is unusually short, and leads to almost constant campaigning.

Simply, the barrier to entry to the US political marketplace seems to be too high. This has bad consequences, in that incumbents can be much less responsive to constituents’ wishes than is desirable in a democracy, but not receive enough corrective feedback at the ballot box. It is perhaps not surprising that public confidence in political institutions has declined substantially in recent years.

Increasing competitiveness in political campaigns seems to me a nonpartisan issue that could gain wide support among voters. The problem may be that politicians don’t want it. By definition, incumbents are at least fairly well optimized for the current system, and mostly would prefer no change. It will require substantial public pressure to achieve change. For example, when New Zealand changed its voting method from FPP to MMP (a form of proportional representation) in the 1990s, public pressure was needed even to get to the stage of a referendum, and there was a strong campaign against change (see this viewpoint of the process).

I have always found it strange that the current players of the game (the politicians) are allowed in many instances in the US to set the rules of the game. Perhaps the most egregious example is the partisan gerrymandering at state level, where in many states a legislature controlled by one party can set the boundaries to favor that party. In New Zealand, along with many US states, independent redistricting commissions do this job. Campaign finance laws are another way in which competition is promoted in many countries. However, in the US it has proved difficult to restrict total spending because of concerns about the First Amendment, although there has been a long history of attempts to reform campaign financing.

I will probably go further in future posts into specific issues raised in this post. For now, I just want to suggest that the idea of improving electoral competition, and using the analogy with commerce, may be helpful in gaining public support for reform of the electoral system. Antitrust lawsuits against large companies have been heavily used, because it is pretty well understood that unchecked mergers and acquisitions can lead to oligopoly and less consumer welfare overall. By analogy, we ought to be promoting easier market entry for good political ideas and parties. The details will be complicated: is it best to first tackle gerrymandering, campaign financing, the voting system, or something else entirely? But gaining wide agreement that more electoral competition is needed seems a necessary first step, and easier goal.

In New Zealand, the only country where I am a citizen, permanent resident noncitizens are allowed to vote in political elections. This to me seems reasonable, since they have made a commitment to the country, likely pay taxes, etc. However, it seems that NZ is an outlier internationally and this is very uncommon. The US, of course, does not operate this way. I would be unhappy at having to give up my NZ citizenship, but it seems that I would not have to, so at this stage I intend to become a US citizen as soon as legally allowed (there are a few years to go yet).

What is more interesting to me is the fact that NZ denies voting rights even to citizens if they have not physically been in the country in the past 3 years (this is the standard length of time between elections, although unlike the US, early elections are possible). This seems very sensible to me – why should I live overseas for decades and yet influence policies that do not affect me but may have a big impact on those living in the country?  Some other countries have such restrictions, but most (all?) are much less strict than NZ. Interestingly, not only does the US allow expatriates to vote in US elections as long as they want, but in 38 states US citizens who have never lived in the US are allowed to vote! Of course, well under 2% of US citizens live abroad, whereas for NZ the figure is apparently more like 15-20%.

In the US, as in NZ and most countries worldwide, the age of voting is 18. The US has a long history of malicious attempts by authorities to restrict voters from exercising their rights, some of which have been tried very recently, and this seems to have caused some people to reject anything that reminds them of such practices. However I really don’t see why there is such strong opposition to some form of voter ID requirement. It is widely used worldwide (NZ does not have it) and according to opinion polls, is overall a popular idea among US voters. It doesn’t seem worth investing political capital into fighting against it on principle.

Apart from being underage or out of the country for too long, there are other ways to lose one’s right to vote. In NZ, prisoners serving sentences of less than 3 years may vote, but not those serving longer sentences, and there are restrictions for some mentally disabled people in secure facilities and for people recently convicted of corrupt electoral practices.. In the US, it varies by state (see this comprehensive guide) and typically requires conviction for a felony (by definition, a crime that is punishable by death or more than one year in prison). In Florida, for example, certain released felons have lost their right to vote permanently. This seems excessive, and at odds with the concept of paying a debt to society and being allowed to be rehabilitated.

Moving to restrictions on candidates, the Constitution places minimum age restrictions on candidates for federal elections: 35 for President, 30 (and 9 years of US citizenship) for Senate and 25 (plus 7 years of US citizenship) for the House of Representatives.  For President, naturalized citizens are not eligible (so you won’t see me running in a few years). I can see why this was instituted, but it seems faintly ridiculous in the modern world. Would Arnold Schwarzenegger really not have acted in the best interests of the US if he had been allowed to be President? Interestingly, although being in prison cramps one’s style as a voter, in the US it is in general not a legal obstacle for candidates. The exception given by the 14th Amendment, Section 3 for those who commit insurrection is very topical this year, being explored in several cases including against Donald Trump (by the way, the disqualification can be overridden by a 2/3 majority in House and Senate). I am not aware of other legal restrictions on candidacy (although each state has rules for ballot access and may have other restrictions). By contrast, many other countries have other  restrictions on presidential candidates (my favorite one so far is   that Indonesian candidates must fear God Almighty; many Muslim-majority countries require the candidate be a Muslim, and the Maldives even requires the Sunni sect). NZ does not have a president, and to be a member of Parliament, a necessary condition is to qualify as a voter.

The job of President appears to be emotionally demanding. The rapidly graying hair of many recent presidents during their tenure is easily noticed.  Typically the President is called on to make difficult decisions that no one else can (as Truman said, “the buck stops here“). A minimum level of physical fitness and stamina, and intellectual ability, is needed, but these should not be overstated. There have been fairly successful presidents who were obese, physically disabled, or poorly educated. Recently I have seen many people claiming that “X is unfit to be President” on the basis of being too old, too uneducated, too inexperienced, etc, and presumably many of these people would agree with instituting (if possible) more restrictions on who can be President. While it is reasonable for a voter  to weight these personal characteristics when deciding whom to vote for, it is not reasonable to try to use them as general disqualifying criteria. It is not that I agree with Roman Hruska that mediocre people deserve representation, but I do think that every person has strengths and weaknesses, it is hard to measure all of them, and decisions on fitness for the job ultimately involve tradeoffs. Almost certainly, no candidate can combine all the strengths of Obama, Jefferson, Clinton, Biden, Truman, Lincoln and Eisenhower, for example. Whether someone is really too old, too uneducated, or too frail to serve ought to be decided by voters.

Having created our scorecard for presidential candidates, we should think about how to fill it in. The information we want is not all available, so we will need to make some educated guesses.

Almost half the time there is one candidate with a track record as president, although it is a long time since we have had two (the last time being when Theodore Roosevelt in 1912, and even then he ran as a “third party” candidate; Grover Cleveland’s run in 1892 is the only previous example of what seems to be happening this year, with a defeated president coming back to capture his party’s nomination).

Every sitting president has made many campaign promises, and performance on these can be checked, although some interpretation is necessary. Politifact (an independent fact-checking organization) has detailed analysis of performance on presidential campaign promises of Trump and Biden. At the time of writing, Biden, with a little over 3 years in office, has 27/6/2/30/33 percent in the categories Kept/Compromise/Broken/Stalled/In the Works while Trump over 4 years accumulated 23/22/53/0/0. So this gives us some idea of their overall effectiveness, and will help illuminate some categories on the scorecard, such as Administrative Skills and Relations with Congress, and may also be relevant to the truthfulness of the presidents.

Propensity for truth-telling is directly relevant to some of the scorecard categories (such as Moral Authority) and may be relevant to some others, such as Public Persuasion. Politifact also looks at the truthfulness of statements by the candidates themselves, with  Trump and Biden having the most data, as expected. There is a clear difference here: all politicians (all humans?) try to take credit for too much and to minimize their faults, and Biden is no exception. but there has never been a major presidential candidate with the sheer volume of  lies that Trump has displayed.

Policy statements are relevant to some categories, such as Vision/Setting an Agenda,  International Relations, Economic Management and Pursued Equal Justice for All. The candidates’ websites (Trump and Biden) are largely uninformative and essentially just portals for fundraising. Each represents a major political party that has (usually) a policy platform, usually updated closer to the election (the current platforms online seem to be holdovers from 2020 –  Democratic and 2016 – Republican). Notably,  the Republicans did not offer a policy platform in 2020. Less detailed and less up-to-date general policy information is on Wikipedia: Democratic and Republican.

Many focused political advocacy groups  and newspapers produce policy comparisons of major candidates closer to the election. These vary in quality and are hard to find systematically, and are often used for Congressional, state and local elections too. A more systematic coverage of these by mainstream media would be very helpful, and something I would like to see in future.

The presidential campaign is long and arduous, and thus serves as a test of stamina, organization and personality. However it does not directly test the ability of candidates to do the job they are auditioning for. It would be worth trying giving candidates exercises (some of which could be take-home) using hypothetical situations, to see how they react. This may be more useful than televised real-time debates, which create heat but not much light.

The good thing about the scorecards is that there are 10 categories, and a small number of serious candidates (usually only two) , so that approximate values for each category are still likely to lead to a clear preference for one candidate. How strong the preference for the higher-scoring candidate has to be in order to motivate a voter to cast a vote is another story, which I will discuss in a later post.

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.