How America’s Presidents are Ranked

Official Results of the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey

Brandon Rottinghaus, University of Houston Justin S. Vaughn, Coastal Carolina University

The 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey was conducted online via Qualtrics

from November 15 to December 31, 2023.

Respondents included current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is the foremost organization of social science experts in presidential politics, as well as scholars who had recently published peer-reviewed academic research in key related scholarly journals or academic presses.

525 respondents were invited to participate, and 154 usable responses were received, yielding a 29.3% response rate.1

Note: Donald Trump’s 2nd term was not included.

The primary purpose of this survey was to create a ranking of presidential greatness that covered all presidents from George Washington to Joe Biden.

To do this, we asked respondents to rate each president on a scale of 0-100 for their overall greatness, with 0=failure, 50=average, and 100=great.

We then averaged the ratings for each president and ranked them from highest average to lowest.

The results of this ranking are quite similar to the results from our previous surveys (released in 2015 and 2018): Abraham Lincoln again tops the list (95.03 average), followed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt (90.83), George Washington (90.32), Teddy Roosevelt (78.58), Thomas Jefferson (77.53), Harry Truman (75.34), Barack Obama (73.8), and Dwight Eisenhower (73.73).

The most notable changes in this ordering are Franklin Delano Roosevelt moving up to #2 from the third spot last year, and Dwight Eisenhower falling back to #8 from #6 last year.

The bottom of the rankings is also relatively stable. Donald Trump rates lowest (10.92), behind James Buchanan
(16.71), Andrew Johnson (21.56), Franklin Pierce (24.6), William Henry Harrison (26.01), and Warren Harding (27.76).

What is most noteworthy about the remaining presidents concerns who has risen and fallen over time. Since our initial survey, several presidents have had significant changes in their rankings.

Barack Obama has risen 9 places (from #16 to #7), as has Ulysses S. Grant (from #26 to #17), while Andrew Jackson has fallen 12 places (from #9 to #21) and Calvin Coolidge has dropped 7 spots (from #27 to #34).

Examining the partisan and ideological differences among our respondents also indicates some interesting dynamics. While partisanship and ideology don’t tend to make a major difference overall, there are a few distinctions worth noting.

For example, Republicans and Conservatives rank George Washington as the greatest president and James Buchanan as the least great.

There are also several presidents where partisan polarization is evident – Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Obama, and Biden – but interestingly not for Bill Clinton.