How Much Does the President Really Matter?

The question we're asking is how much does the President of the United States really matter? That's a really hard question to answer. We could just look in data and see whether the economy went well under certain presidents and poorly under others. But we've actually had so few presidents that's going to be pretty uninformative, and the truth is it could be reverse causation. People tend to vote Democrat when they're worried about unemployment,. They tend to vote Republican when they're concerned about budget or inflation. So sorting this out is very difficult.