There's a lot of debate over whether the economy typically performs better under a Democratic president or a Republican president. Seeming to conflict are opinions, conventional wisdom, actual wisdom and, of course, statistics.
We've collected several sources' analyses here so you can make your own informed assertion:
NEW YORK TIMES
The New York Times put together a great chart on various economic indicators through the last 11 presidencies, including how much of a share of the total income is represented by the lowest 99% of earners, federal budget surplus and others.
SLATE
Slate's Michael Kinsley asserts that by analyzing the annual Economic Report of the President, he was able to conclude "almost beyond doubt...that Democrats are better at virtually every economic task that is important to Republicans." He writes:
The only point is that if you find the Republican mantra of lower taxes and smaller government appealing, and if you care only about how fast the economy is growing, not how that growth is shared, you should vote Democratic. Of course, if you do care about things like economic inequality and children's health, you should vote Democratic as well.
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Arthur L. Blaustein of the San Francisco Chronicle suggests that the election hinges on this very question of which party is best equipped to turn the economy around:
Most Americans have one eye on the nation's financial crises and the other on the presidential election. And they are asking themselves, "Is John McCain or Barack Obama, the Democrats or the Republicans, better for the economic health of the country as well as for my own financial well-being?" That is the defining question of this election.
During the 20th century, the Dow Jones industrial average rose 7.3 percent per year on average under Republican presidents. Under Democrats, it rose 10.3 percent - which means that investors gained a whopping 41 percent more.
Clearly, the economic policies of the last 15 years point unequivocally to the competence of Democratic leaders. The Clinton-Gore administration, lest we forget, drastically reduced the national debt as wages increased and joblessness diminished. Team Bush-Cheney has subsequently landed us in the current economic crisis, complete with record deficits and record household debt. In fact, as Blaustein argues, "More than 70 percent of our national debt was created by just three Republican presidents: Reagan and the two Bushes."
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
Larry M. Bartels recently wrote in the Christian Science Monitor, "During the past 60 years, Democrats have presided over much less unemployment and much more robust income growth." He considers unemployment statistics:
In the past three decades, the average unemployment rate under Republican presidents has been 6.7 percent - substantially higher than the 5.5 percent average under Democratic presidents. Over an even broader time period, since the late 1940s, unemployment has averaged 4.8 percent under Democratic presidents but 6.3 percent - almost one-third higher - under Republican presidents.
THE NEW YORKER
Nevertheless, as George Packer recently explored in the New Yorker, the white working class, whom he describes as "the golden key to political power in America," often votes against their own economic self interest:
Until the mid-seventies, the white working class--the heart of the New Deal coalition--voted largely Democratic. Since the Carter years, the percentages have declined from sixty to forty, and this shift has roughly coincided with the long hold of the Republican Party on the White House. The decline in white working-class support for Democrats occurred in one period--from the mid-seventies until the early nineties, with a brief lull in the early eighties--and has remained well below fifty per cent ever since. But they concluded that social issues like abortion, guns, religion, and even (outside the South) race had little to do with the shift. Instead, according to their data, it was based on a judgment that--during years in which industrial jobs went overseas, unions practically vanished, and working-class incomes stagnated--the Democratic Party was no longer much help to them.
Working-class whites, their fortunes falling, began to embrace the anti-government, low-tax rhetoric of the conservative movement. During Clinton's Presidency, the downward economic spiral of these Americans was arrested, but by then their identification with the Democrats had eroded. Having earlier moved to the right for economic reasons, the Arizona study concluded, the working class stayed there because of the rising prominence of social issues--Thomas Frank's argument. But the Democrats fundamentally lost the white working class because these voters no longer believed the Party's central tenet--that government could restore a sense of economic security.
NYT MAGAZINE
As Larry M. Bartels quoted Treasury Secretary Paulson in The New York Times Magazine last April:
The growing income gap "is simply an economic reality, and it is neither fair nor useful to blame any political party." Paulson's assertion, however, is strongly contradicted by the historical record. While technology, demographic trends and globalization are clearly important, purely economic accounts ignore what may be the most important influence on changing U.S. income distribution -- the contrasting policy choices of Republican and Democratic presidents.
He provides yet more evidence confirming the reality that having a Democrat in office is significantly better for the economy:
The Census Bureau has tracked the economic fortunes of affluent, middle-class and poor American families for six decades. According to my analysis, these tabulations reveal a wide partisan disparity in income growth. The real incomes of middle-class families grew more than twice as fast under Democratic presidents as they did under Republican presidents. Even more remarkable, the real incomes of working-poor families (at the 20th percentile of the income distribution) grew six times as fast when Democrats held the White House. Only the incomes of affluent families were relatively impervious to partisan politics, growing robustly under Democrats and Republicans alike.