Data Watch · Democrats vs. Republicans, Part 2 of 7 · October 8, 2026, 8:00 AM CDT
Key Facts
- Prices rose about 3.6% a year under Democratic presidents and 3.5% under Republican ones since 1953, a difference too small to tell apart from chance.[1]
- Pay after inflation grew +0.34% a year under Democrats and +0.28% under Republicans since 1964. Neither party’s presidents stand out.[1]
- The worst stretch for prices was the late 1970s: inflation averaged 10.4% a year under Jimmy Carter and 7.0% under Gerald Ford.[1]
- The Federal Reserve says the Great Inflation of 1965–1982 built up over several administrations, and was ended by Fed Chair Paul Volcker’s tight money policy. [2]
Your grocery bill does not care about party. But the argument about who is to blame for prices never stops, so we checked the numbers from both sides.
This is Part 2 of 7. Part 1 looked at jobs. Today it is the two numbers most people feel every week: how fast prices rise, and whether pay keeps up.
- Part 1: Jobs · Oct 7
- Part 2: Prices and paychecks (this post)
- Part 3: Growth and recessions · Oct 9
- Part 4: Debt and deficits · Oct 10
- Part 5: Congress · Oct 11
- Part 6: Voters · Oct 12
- Part 7: Red and blue states · Oct 13
The question
Did prices rise faster under one party’s presidents? And did paychecks buy more or less?
We use the Consumer Price Index, which tracks a basket of goods and services households buy.[3] For pay we use average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory workers, divided by the price index so that inflation is removed.[1]
The lowest-inflation stretches were Carter (10.4%) and Ford (7.0%). The highest were Kennedy (1.1%) and Eisenhower (1.4%). Notice that both lists contain presidents from both parties.
Why the 1970s look the way they do
The long climb in the chart began in the mid-1960s. A Federal Reserve history essay describes a Great Inflation from 1965 to 1982 that started under President Johnson, ran through the Nixon, Ford and Carter years, and peaked above 14 percent in 1980. It names oil embargoes in 1973–74 and 1978–79, large government deficits and the end of the gold link as part of the cause.[2]
It says inflation was brought down by Fed Chair Paul Volcker, who tightened money from 1979, at the price of recessions in 1980 and 1981–82.[2] Presidents of both parties are in that story, and so is a central bank that does not answer to either.
What paychecks could buy
After inflation, the best stretches for hourly pay were Trump’s first term (1.7%) and Johnson (1.6%). The worst were Carter (-2.1%) and G.H.W. Bush (-1.0%). The gap between the party averages is only 0.06 points a year.
What the data says, and what it does not
It says that, over the whole period, neither party’s presidents had a clear edge on prices or on pay after inflation. It also shows that the worst episodes cluster around oil shocks and the pandemic reopening, not around a party label.
It does not say who was to blame for any single price spike. Prices respond to oil, supply chains, interest rates and global demand. We also cannot see how pay changed for different groups: these are averages across production and nonsupervisory workers, and the series begins in 1964.
- Democratic presidents averaged 0.2 points of yearly inflation more than Republican presidents on this measure. The 95% range around that gap runs from -2.3 to +3.2 points of yearly inflation; if the party label meant nothing, a gap this large would show up in about 90.6% of random shuffles of the 6 Democratic and 8 Republican presidencies.[1]
- Democratic presidents averaged 0.11 points of yearly real pay growth less than Republican presidents on this measure. The 95% range around that gap runs from -1.45 to +1.01 points of yearly real pay growth; if the party label meant nothing, a gap this large would show up in about 86.4% of random shuffles of the 5 Democratic and 7 Republican presidencies.[1]
- The inflation averages hide huge swings inside a single term. For example, the Biden bar (5.0%) covers a spike and its fall, and the Trump second-term bar (3.0%) covers only 19 months.
- Tests where the interval crosses zero mean we cannot tell the parties apart on that measure with this data. That is a finding, not a failure.
- Inflation: how fast average prices rise
- Consumer Price Index (CPI): the Labor Department’s measure of what a typical basket of household purchases costs
- Real wages: pay adjusted for inflation, so it shows buying power
- Great Inflation: the Federal Reserve’s name for the long run of high inflation from 1965 to 1982
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.
- Primary U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPI-U all items (series CUSR0000SA0) and average hourly earnings of production and nonsupervisory employees (series CES0500000008), monthly data, retrieved Oct 6, 2026 through the BLS public API (latest CPI month: August 2026). data.bls.gov
- Secondary Bryan, M., “The Great Inflation (1965–1982),” Federal Reserve History, Nov 22, 2013. An essay by Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland economist Michael Bryan. federalreservehistory.org
- Tertiary “Consumer price index,” Wikipedia (a CPI is a weighted average price of a market basket of consumer goods and services; its annual change is used as a measure of inflation). 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.
Kemetic Minds Editorial Desk
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