Electing Good Presidents: the States’ Report Cards

This project is a collaboration with betaveros, the author of BetaWorldProblems (betaveros.wordpress.com).

Last year, the American Political Science Association polled political scientists on how they would rank the presidents of the United States. In the below chart, we mark which states (plus DC) voted for each president in the presidential election history of the United States (as indicated by the presence of a number in the row of a state in the column for a president), giving them points depending on the ranking of these presidents, ranging from +21 for the best-ranked president (Lincoln) to -21 for the worst-ranked president (Buchanan). In the rightmost column is the average score per election for each state, reflecting how good a state has been at voting for presidents that end up (at least from the point of view of present American political science experts) being considered the good ones.

Decimal quantities exist in some entries. These are cases where a state decided to allot some, but not all, of their electoral votes to the candidate that won the election, and thus are given a proportional number of the points for that president.

states_electing_presidents

Here’s a map showing the averages. Greens are positive averages; the darker the green, the higher the average.

states_electing_presidents_map

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