Professional political scientists believe that President Joe Biden is in the upper tier of presidents across all of American history and that President Donald Trump is the overall worst, according to a new survey of presidential scholars by the American Political Science Association.
The organization asked current and recent members of their Presidents and Executive Politics, which they describe as the “foremost organization of social science experts in presidential politics,” to rank the forty-five commanders-in-chief with respect to their “presidential greatness.” The average response of the scholars placed Biden in fourteenth place and Trump in forty-fifth.
Biden, who is nearing the completion of his first term and is mounting a reelection campaign despite questions about his mental fitness, outranked Ronald Reagan by two slots and fell only four slots behind John F. Kennedy. President Barack Obama was ranked seventh overall, falling two slots behind Thomas Jefferson and outranking both Dwight Eisenhower and James Madison. Obama has risen nine places in the rankings since the initial survey in 2015.
When asked which president should be the next to have their faces engraved on Mount Rushmore, respondents named Franklin Delano Roosevelt, followed by Barack Obama.
Respondents were also asked which presidents they believe to be the most polarizing: they said that Trump is the most controversial, followed by Andrew Jackson, Barack Obama, and Ronald Reagan, while George Washington was ranked as the overall least polarizing.
Researchers who conducted the survey noted that there are “some interesting dynamics” that emerge with respect to the “partisan and ideological differences” among respondents. Those who self-identified as conservative were much more likely to grant Trump a higher rating, while others who self-identified as liberals granted Trump the most aggressively poor ratings.
Academics in the political science field are overwhelmingly more likely to be progressive rather than conservative, even with respect to other fields: one study from 2005 concluded that 81% identified as the former while 2% identified as the latter. Some 58% were affiliated with the Democratic Party while 8% were affiliated with the Republican Party.