Comparing the Two Parties on the Economy

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I often see infographics and memes about how, in contrast to public perception, Democratic administrations tend to be better for the U.S. economy than Republican administrations, but they always seem a little cherry picked to me, and they never explain their data or their methodology. So I decided to try doing my own calculations. I selected six major, commonly used economic indicators, collected data from official, public sources for each, and processed the data in uniform ways.

And sure enough, Democratic administrations have been much better for the economy over the last 44 years.

Here’s the infographic I ended up producing, and here is the spreadsheet with the raw data and calculations. I’ll say more about my calculations below the graphic.

My process:

  1. I gathered data from official, public sources for each indicator for every year starting with 1980.
  2. I started at 1980 because before then, there was a bipartisan consensus on how to best handle the economy: basically the opposite of the “supply side” economics (or, as George H. Bush put it before he had to adopt it himself, “voodoo” economics) that Reagan introduced. So it’s really only starting in 1980 that we can usefully compare the disparate approaches the two major parties are taking today.
  3. For data that existed in monetary form (the deficit, GDP, and the stock market), I converted each year’s amount into 2024 dollars. Otherwise, inflation would make negative indicators like the deficit look better than they were and positive indicators like GDP look worse, since a big part of their growth over the years was just normal inflation.
  4. For each indicator, I calculated the average change per year. This was important because Republican presidents served more years than Democratic presidents between 1980 and 2024, so using total amounts of change would have made the Republicans look worse on things like the deficit and better on things like GDP. It would also have made presidents that served eight years look worse on the deficit but better on GDP than presidents who served only four years.
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