Economics · Oct 7, 2026Democrats vs. Republicans, Part 1: Which Party’s Presidents Saw More Jobs Added?

Data Watch · Democrats vs. Republicans, Part 1 of 7 · October 7, 2026, 8:00 AM CDT

Key Facts

• Since Dwight Eisenhower took office in 1953, the U.S. added about 198,000 payroll jobs a month under Democratic presidents and about 66,000 under Republican presidents.^[1]
• The average unemployment rate during their terms was nearly the same: 5.7% under Democrats and 5.8% under Republicans.^[1]
• Democratic presidents tended to take office when unemployment was already high (6.9% on average, against 4.7% for Republicans), which makes rebounds easier.^[1]
• A 2016 study in the American Economic Review found the economy did better under Democratic presidents and attributed the gap to oil shocks, productivity and the world economy, not to different monetary or fiscal policies. ^[2]

Every month, someone points at the jobs report and says it proves their party is right. This week we are lining up the government’s own numbers, president by president, to see what they actually show, and what they cannot.

This is Part 1 of a seven-part series that compares what happened under Democratic and Republican presidents. We use the same rules for both parties, show our work, and say plainly where the data runs out.

The question

When a Democrat was in the White House, did the country add more jobs than when a Republican was?

Here is how we measured it. For each president since 1953 we took the number of payroll jobs in the month they arrived and the month they left, and divided the difference by the months in between.^[1] That makes a two-term president and a short one comparable.

The gap is large. Democratic presidencies average 198,000 jobs a month and Republican ones 66,000. The best Democratic stretches were Biden (321,000 a month) and Clinton (239,000 a month); the weakest stretches were Trump’s first term (-58,000 a month) and G.W. Bush (14,000 a month).

Unemployment tells a different story

A rising job count and a falling unemployment rate are different things. The unemployment rate is the share of people who want work and are actively looking but do not have it.^[3] Over whole terms it barely separates the parties: 5.7% on average under Democratic presidents and 5.8% under Republican ones.^[1]

Where they started matters

A president who arrives in the middle of a downturn has an easier job count to beat than one who arrives at a peak. Democratic presidents arrived with unemployment at 6.9% on average. Republican presidents arrived at 4.7%.^[1]

Across all 14 presidencies, a higher starting unemployment rate goes along with faster job growth (a correlation of 0.47, where 1.0 would be a perfect match). That does not settle the question, but it is a reason not to read the gap as purely a party effect.

One big exception: the pandemic

Donald Trump’s first term shows a loss of about 58,000 jobs a month. Almost all of it comes from two months. Payrolls stood at 152.3 million in February 2020 and 130.4 million in April, a fall of 21.9 million.^[1]

If you stop the clock in February 2020, the last month before the pandemic recession, that term averages 180,000 jobs a month. We show the full term in the chart because the rule for every president is the same, and we show this alternative so you can judge.

What the data says, and what it does not

It says that, measured this way, payroll jobs grew faster under Democratic presidents since 1953. It also says the unemployment rate did not differ much between the parties.

It does not say a president creates jobs by themselves. The Federal Reserve sets interest rates independently, Congress writes the budget, and oil prices, wars and pandemics hit every president. Economists Alan Blinder and Mark Watson studied this in a well-known 2016 paper. They found the economy did better under Democratic presidents “almost regardless of how one measures performance,” but they attributed the gap to “more benign oil shocks, superior total factor productivity (TFP) performance, a more favorable international environment, and perhaps more optimistic consumer expectations,” not to differences in monetary or fiscal policy. ^[2]

Check it yourself: the sources, by tier

Primary sources are the agencies and datasets themselves. Secondary sources are research and analysis built on them. Tertiary sources are reference works. Each was read before it was cited.

1. Primary U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Employment Statistics (series CES0000000001) and Current Population Survey (series LNS14000000), monthly data 1948 to September 2026, retrieved Oct 6, 2026 through the BLS public API. data.bls.gov
2. Secondary Blinder, A. S., and Watson, M. W., “Presidents and the US Economy: An Econometric Exploration,” American Economic Review 106(4), 2016, pp. 1015–1045. Peer-reviewed research. doi.org
3. Tertiary “Unemployment in the United States,” Wikipedia (definition of the U-3 rate: people without a job who have looked for work in the prior four weeks and are available). wikipedia.org

Investigative methodology: this series was written by a person from the sources cited, with every figure computed by a script from the primary data linked in each part; no language model chose or wrote a number. “Democratic” and “Republican” mean the party of the president in office. The comparison describes what happened under each party’s presidents. It does not show that a president or a party caused it.

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