All the U.S. Presidents, Ranked by “Greatness” in 2024

Robert Lawrence
Cognitive Feedback Loop
3 min readFeb 19, 2024

A visualization of the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Survey

At 5 feet and 4 inches, President James Madison was the shortest of all U.S. presidents. The youngest was President John F. Kennedy, who entered office at the age of 43, while Joe Biden is the oldest at age 81. And President William Harrison served in the office for the shortest term at 31 days. This much, everyone can agree on.

But who was the greatest?

This question was posed to 154 current and recent members of the Presidents & Executive Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, which is the leading organization of social science experts in U.S. presidential politics. These political scientists scored each president’s “greatness” on a scale of 0 to 100, with 0 being a failure, 50 being average and 100 being great.

The survey scores were compiled and reported by political scientists Brandon Rottinghaus of the University of Houston, and Justin S. Vaughn of Coastal Carolina University. Their findings were released earlier this year in a white paper report titled, “Official Results of the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project Expert Survey.”

I compiled some of the data from that report and graphed it — see below.

A ranking of U.S. presidents based on a 2024 survey of political scientists, showing Abraham Lincoln ranks first, and Donald Trump ranks last.

So as shown above, Lincoln, FDR, and Washington are the salient top 3. Current President Biden ranks at 14th, while Trump ranks last.

Some may say that the results are obviously skewed by the liberal biases of the academics who participated in the survey, and those people would probably be right. But, being the objectively-minded academics that they are, the authors of this report parsed this data and provided separate reports for how each president was rated by the survey respondents on the left and right side of the political fence. I incorporated this data in the graph above by adding lines representing the ratings given by those who identified as republicans, and those who identified as democrats. This establishes a possible range of scoring for each president, and gives some idea of what the highest or lowest possible rating could be for a given president in this poll based on the range of biases that exists among those who were surveyed.

The last time these political scientists conducted this survey was in 2018. I also made a graph of the 2018 survey results that year, which you can see and read about here (with language in the text that copied from for this post).

U.S. presidents are also ranked in the Siena College U.S. Presidents Study, which is conducted one year after a new president is elected. In the 2022 version of that study, 141 presidential scholars ranked all U.S. presidents, including Biden, based on 20 categories such as executive ability, leadership, and integrity. In the chart below, those ranking are compared with the ones from the 2024 survey described above. You’ll notice a few differences, but overall it follows a similar pattern.

Robert Lawrence writes about science and illustrates data. You can find his published work at www.robertlawrencephd.com

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Written by Robert Lawrence

Data visualization and science writing. Science editor in academia and biochem PhD. Published work at: www.robertlawrencephd.com

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