From the Narrow Desert

It has come to my attention that I posted this back in 2013:

Another point in favor of democracy is that mass elections do tend to ensure that kings meet certain very basic standards of competence and normality. Of course many democratically elected leaders are scoundrels, and some of them are relatively incompetent — but I feel pretty safe in saying that the U.S. has never elected a president with a two-digit IQ and never will. Nor do 12-year-olds win elections, or people with serious mental illnesses. 

We regret the error. 

Get a load of this jackass.

NEW! THE SCIENTIST SHIRT-now with safety glasses! Orders now and it will arrive before the mid-Dec. holidays. In stock w/ YOUTH S to 5XL + many FITTED (aka womyn) sizes available! Perfect for the scientist in your life. https://t.co/gjAQOTTFWH 10% of profits to Black Girls Code! pic.twitter.com/c20AeTX0fg

— They Might Be Giants (@tmbg) November 21, 2020

The Science, people!

JF: w/ thirty or so failed legal actions, it seem the clown car that is T's legal team and his legions of GOP sycophants haven't learned accusations need to backed w/ evidence. But maybe they're just trying to undermine trust in the systems of Democracy. Un-American. #BidenWon.

— They Might Be Giants (@tmbg) November 21, 2020

2020: The year They Might Be Giants, without a trace of irony, warned against those who would "undermine trust in the systems."

This, to coin a phrase, is where the party ends.

In my recent post "How often do voters choose the best candidate?" I looked at 15 different U.S. elections in which at least two of the candidates eventually served as president, and in which one of those candidates is generally agreed to have been a better president than the other(s). I found that the voters chose the best candidate two out of three times.

Following up on that, I thought it would be interesting to look at the results from individual states. The map below shows how often each state made the "right" choice in the 15 elections being considered. (The "right" choices were Jefferson in 1796 and 1800; Jackson in 1824 and 1828; Van Buren in 1836, 1840, and 1848; Fillmore in 1856; Cleveland in 1888 and 1892; the Roosevelts in 1912 and 1932; Kennedy in 1960; Reagan in 1980; and, although it pains me to say it, Clinton in 1992. Not all of these were good presidents, just better than the available alternatives. Millard Fillmore, for example, is universally considered to have been a terrible president; but James Buchanan, against whom he was running in 1856, is universally considered to have been even worse.)

See the data here

A few trends are immediately obvious. The Bible Belt comes out looking pretty good, for example. But for me the most striking result is the abysmal performance of New England. The five states with the worst track record are five of the six New England States! Vermont is dead last (choosing the best candidate only 13% of the time), followed by Maine (23%), and then Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island (all 27%). Connecticut did a bit better (40%), but is still red rather than green. A pattern like that can't be a coincidence. Also note that the Mormon Corridor, despite being conservative/religious like the Bible Belt, is red -- because the early Mormons who settled that region were mostly transplants from New England! Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were both born in Vermont.

I have no real idea what the problem with New Englanders is. I lived in New Hampshire for five years and am quite fond of the region, but apparently democracy just isn't their strong suit. The God who made New Hampshire taunted the lofty land with clueless voters.

UPDATE: I've corrected some minor errors in my data, but nothing of substance has changed. Nebraska is now tied with Rhode Island for the third-worst position, the only non-New England state to do so badly.

To answer that question, I looked at 16 different U.S. elections -- those in which two or more of the major candidates sooner or later served as president. With both candidates' performance as president a matter of public record, we can attempt to judge whether or not the voters made the "right" choice.

As a measure of the relative merit of the different presidents, I used the data collected in the Wikipedia article Historical rankings of presidents of the United States, which tabulates the results of 20 different surveys in which historians ranked the past presidents of the U.S. (There are fewer than 20 data points for some of the more recent presidents, since the earliest surveys were conducted in the mid-20th century; for each president, I also excluded as premature any results obtained before he had completed his full term in office.)

I was surprised at how little controversy there is about the relative ranking of most presidents. I looked at 12 sets of presidents (11 pairs and 1 threesome); for 7 out of the 12, the surveys were in 100% agreement as to which president in the set was the best, and for most of the others the rate of agreement was also very high. The only pair regarding whom there was no consensus was Carter and Ford, each of whom was ranked higher by exactly half of the surveys in the data set.

Here are the relevant data. The numbers in parentheses represent what percentage of the popular vote each candidate won. The name of the candidate judged by historians to have made a better president is in boldface. An asterisk after a candidate's name indicates that he had already served as president prior to the election in question and was thus a known quantity.

• 1796: J. Adams (53.4%), Jefferson (46.6%)  -- 100% rank Jefferson higher
• 1800: Jefferson (61.4%) , J. Adams* (38.6%) -- 100% rank Jefferson higher
• 1824: Jackson (41.4%), J. Q. Adams (30.9%) -- 100% rank Jackson higher
• 1828: Jackson (56.0%), J. Q. Adams* (43.6%)  -- 100% rank Jackson higher
• 1836: Van Buren (50.8%), W. H. Harrison (36.6%) -- 100% rank Van Buren higher
• 1840: W. H. Harrison (52.9%), Van Buren* (46.8%) -- 100% rank Van Buren higher
• 1848: Taylor (47.3%), Van Buren* (10.13%) -- 85% rank Van Buren higher
• 1856: Buchanan (45.3%), Fillmore* (21.5%) -- 100% rank Fillmore higher
• 1888: Cleveland* (48.6%), B. Harrison (47.8%)-- 100% rank Cleveland higher
• 1892: Cleveland* (46.0%), B. Harrison* (43.0%) -- 100% rank Cleveland higher
• 1912: Wilson (41.8%), T. Roosevelt* (27.4%), Taft* (23.2%) -- 90% rank Roosevelt highest, 10% Wilson, 0% Taft
• 1932: F. D. Roosevelt (57.4%), Hoover* (39.7%) -- 100% rank Roosevelt higher
• 1960: Kennedy (49.72%), Nixon (49.55%) -- 100% rank Kennedy higher
• 1976: Carter (50.1%), Ford* (48.0%) -- no consensus
• 1980: Reagan (50.7%), Carter* (41.0%) -- 93% rank Reagan higher
• 1992: Clinton (43.0%), G. H. W. Bush* (37.4%) -- 89% rank Clinton higher