A new release, the Presidential Greatness Project, lists the top presidents in its 2024 survey. The poll interviewed 154 people who were current and recent of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association. Many of those polled were scholars in this field.
The greatest U.S. President was Abraham Lincoln. The worst was Donald Trump.
Lincoln was number one, followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt at two. America’s first president, George Washington, ranked third on the list. He was followed by Theodore Roosevelt in fourth place, with Thomas Jefferson landing in fifth place.
Among party lines, Republicans that were polled ranked Reagan as fifth-best, George W. Bush as 19th and Trump at 41st. Democrats even gave Reagan decent praise, ranking him 18th, with George W. Bush in 33rd, and Trump at the bottom with a 45 ranking.
Some people observing the poll found it to be off in some of its analyses. For example, former President Barack Obama received a higher ranking (#7) than former President Bill Clinton (#12) and current President Joe Biden ranked 14th.
When considering that Clinton was the first Democrat to win reelection since FDR and presided over one of the best economies, scholars still ranked him lower than Obama and barely higher than Biden.
The survey also conducted on which presidents were overrated and underrated.
Most underrated were Jimmy Carter, Ulysses Grant, George H.W. Bush, Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson, and President Biden.
The most over-rated were John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Andrew Jackson, Woodrow Wilson, Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt.
On the over and under ratings, the authors of survey admitted they approached it by “assessments of these reputational mismatches.”
On the top 25 greatest presidents of all time, here is the breakdown.
1 Abraham Lincoln
2 Franklin Delano Roosevelt
3 George Washington
4 Theodore Roosevelt
5 Thomas Jefferson
6 Harry Truman
7 Barack Obama
8 Dwight D. Eisenhower
9 Lyndon Baines Johnson
10 John F. Kennedy
11 James Madison
12 Bill Clinton
13 John Adams
14 Joe Biden
15 Woodrow Wilson
16 Ronald Reagan
17 Ulysses S. Grant
18 James Monroe
19 George Herbert Walker Bush
20 John Quincy Adams
21 Andrew Jackson
22 Jimmy Carter
23 William Howard Taft
24 William McKinley
25 James K. Polk
