Probably Dance

I made a website to explore FRED data broken down by US president and party. This is obviously motivated by the current president. During the last election I was frustrated by how many nonsense arguments there were being made. Like people voting for republicans because they were hoping for a good economy. This seemed exactly backwards in my mind because in my lifetime there was a repeated pattern of republicans messing up the economy followed by democrats cleaning up. But I’m really not good at having arguments with people, so I’d rather let the data do the talking.

There is a series of papers that explore the relationship of presidents to GDP, and I have wanted to dig into that data before, and also try other metrics.

But how do you do a fair comparison of the two parties? In a way that works for any metric that you can think of? My first thoughts were all way too complicated and a simple averaging of line graphs was what won out. I’m even ignoring that e.g. Obama was in office for eight years vs Biden for four years. These count as three separate terms. In the end the graph didn’t look like I expected, but it still clearly shows higher GDP growth during democrat presidencies.