Astrologers have also stated their opinion after examining the stars of the top contenders, in addition to various polls done to determine the next US President.
In This Article...
In 2020, who will be the president of the United States?
The 2020 presidential election in the United States was the 59th quadrennial presidential election, held on November 3, 2020. Former Vice President Joe Biden and California junior senator Kamala Harris defeated incumbent Republican President Donald Trump and Vice President Mike Pence on the Democratic ticket. The election took place against the backdrop of the global epidemic of COVID-19 and the ensuing recession. It was the first presidential election since 1992, the first in the twenty-first century, and the sixth in the last century in which the incumbent president did not win re-election. The election witnessed the largest voter turnout by percentage since 1900, with each of the two major parties earning over 74 million votes, breaking Barack Obama’s previous high of 69.5 million votes set in 2008. Biden earned almost 81 million votes, the most ever voted for a presidential candidate in the United States.
Biden won the Democratic nomination over his closest challenger, Senator Bernie Sanders, in a tough primary that featured the most candidates for any major party in the modern age of American politics. Harris, Biden’s running mate, is the first African-American, Asian-American, and female vice presidential nominee on a major party ticket. Howie Hawkins received the Green nomination with Angela Nicole Walker as his running companion, while Jo Jorgensen secured the Libertarian nomination with Spike Cohen as her running mate. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic’s public health and economic impacts; civil unrest in response to the police murder of George Floyd and others; the Supreme Court following the death of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett; and the future of the Affordable Care Act were all major issues in the election.
Due to the ongoing pandemic, a record number of early and mail-in ballots were cast. Democrats voted by mail in far greater numbers than Republicans. Because of the large number of mail-in ballots, some swing states experienced delays in vote counting and reporting, prompting major news organizations to postpone their projections of Biden and Harris as president-elect and vice president-elect until November 7, three and a half days after the election. Major media outlets will predict a state for a candidate when there is high statistical certainty that the outstanding vote will not prevent the projected victor from winning the state. With 306 electoral votes, Biden won the majority in the Electoral College, while Trump garnered 232. Biden became the first Democrat to win presidential elections in Georgia and Arizona since 1992 and 1996, respectively, as well as the first candidate to win nationally without Ohio since 1960 and without Florida since 1992, thereby deflating the former’s bellwether role. Since 1976, Biden is the first Democrat to win without Iowa. It’s the first time since 1880 that both major party candidates won the same number of states, and the first time since 1948 that a single party has won the popular vote four times in a row.
Trump and numerous Republicans sought to sabotage the election and reverse the results before, during, and after Election Day, falsely alleging rampant voter fraud and attempting to influence the vote-counting process in swing states. There was no indication of widespread fraud or anomalies in the election, according to Attorney General William Barr and officials from each of the 50 states. The election was described as the safest in American history by federal authorities in charge of election security. The Trump campaign and its allies, including Republican members of Congress, continued to try to overturn the election results by filing 63 lawsuits in various states (all of which were withdrawn or dismissed), spreading conspiracy theories alleging fraud, and pressuring Republican state election officials (including, notably, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in a phone call that later became widely publicized) and legislators to rescind the election results. After Trump repeatedly stated that he would never surrender the election, a crowd of Trump supporters attacked the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. However, in a video shared to Twitter on January 7, one day after the deadly Capitol attack and two months after Biden’s victory was announced, Trump acknowledged the new administration without mentioning Biden’s name. On January 20, 2021, Biden and Harris were sworn in as presidents.
Who was the most effective President?
Harvard University historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr. conducted a poll in 1948. Schlesinger also conducted a survey in 1962, polling 75 historians. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., Schlesinger’s son, conducted another poll in 1996.
The Chicago Tribune conducted a poll of 49 historians in 1982, and the results are included in The Complete Book of US Presidents. The ranking of Dwight D. Eisenhower, which improved from 22nd in 1962 to 9th in 1982, was a considerable shift from the 1962 Schlesinger survey.
The results of a poll performed by William J. Ridings Jr. and Stuart B. McIver from 1988 to 1996 and published in Rating The Presidents: A Ranking of US Leaders, from the Great and Honorable to the Dishonest and Incompetent, are shown in the 1996 column. More than 719 persons took part in the poll, the majority of whom were academic historians and political scientists, but there were also politicians and celebrities. Female historians and “specialists in African-American studies,” as well as a few non-American historians, were included among the participants, who came from every state. The presidents were judged in five categories (leadership qualities, accomplishments, crisis management, political skill, appointments, and character and integrity) by poll respondents, with the results collated to establish the overall ranking.
A “ideologically balanced group of 132 notable professors of history, law, and political science” was surveyed by The Wall Street Journal in 2000. The editors argued that past polls had been dominated by either one side or the other, thus this poll sought to include an equal number of liberals and conservatives. This poll had more replies from women, minorities, and young professors than the 1996 Schlesinger poll, according to the editors. The editors noted that the results of their poll were “remarkably similar” to those of the 1996 Schlesinger poll, with the main difference in the 2000 poll being lower rankings for 1960s presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy, and a higher ranking for President Ronald Reagan, who came in eighth. Franklin D. Roosevelt maintained his position as one of the top three presidents.
In 2005, The Wall Street Journal conducted another presidential survey for the Federalist Society, this time with James Lindgren of Northwestern University Law School. The editors aimed to balance the views of liberals and conservatives, modifying the results “to give Democratic- and Republican-leaning researchers equal weight,” as they did in the 2000 survey. Although Franklin D. Roosevelt remained in the top three, editor James Taranto pointed out that Democratic-leaning experts voted George W. Bush as the sixth-worst president of all time, while Republican scholars selected him as the sixth-best, giving him a split-decision grade of “average.”
Since Ronald Reagan, the Siena College Research Institute has conducted polls in the second year of each president’s first term in 1982, 1990, 1994, 2002, 2010, and 2018. Historians, political scientists, and presidential academics rank presidents on a variety of traits, abilities, and accomplishments in these polls. Only two presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln, received more than 80 points in the 1994 poll, while Andrew Johnson and Warren G. Harding received less than 50 points.
The following are the findings of a 2006 Siena College poll of 744 professors:
- “George W. Bush recently completed a five-year term as President. How would you rate him if today was the last day of his presidency? The percentages were as follows: Great: 2%, Near Great: 5%, Average: 11%, and Below Average: 7% “Failure: 58 percent; rage: 24 percent”
- “Do you think he has a realistic prospect of raising his rating, in your opinion?” Two-thirds of respondents (67%) said no; less than a quarter (23%) said yes; and 10% said “no opinion or not applicable.”
Professor emeritus of American studies at Siena College, Thomas Kelly, said: “President Bush appears to have little hope of receiving high scores from today’s generation of historians and political scientists. In this example, public opinion polls appear to give the President more leeway than specialists do “.. Douglas Lonnstrom, a statistician at Siena College and the director of the Siena Research Institute, said: “President Bush was ranked 23rd out of 42 presidents in our 2002 presidential rating, which was conducted with a panel of experts similar to the one used in this poll. That happened shortly after the terrorist attacks of September 11th, 2001. The instructors clearly do not think things have gone well for him in recent years. These are the specialists who are currently teaching college students and will be writing the history of this era in the future “..
The Times of London asked eight of its “leading foreign and political writers” to rate all 42 presidents “in order of brilliance” in 2008.
A committee of presidential historians and biographers compiled the rankings for the C-SPAN Survey of Presidential Leadership. The C-SPAN Presidential Leadership Survey has been conducted on four occasions: in 2000, 2009, 2017, and 2021. C-Academic SPAN’s Advisor Team, which includes Douglas G. Brinkley, Edna Greene Medford, Richard Norton Smith, and Amity Shlaes, polled 142 presidential historians. Each historian rates each president on a scale of one to ten in ten categories: public persuasion, crisis leadership, economic management, moral authority, international relations, administrative skills, relations with Congress, vision/setting an agenda, pursued equal justice for all, and performance within the context of his times. The findings of all four C-SPAN polls were quite similar. In each survey, Abraham Lincoln has received the highest score, while George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Theodore Roosevelt have consistently rated in the top five, while James Buchanan, Andrew Johnson, and Franklin Pierce have consistently ranked at the bottom.
Former President George W. Bush was placed 39th out of 43 presidential candidates in a 2010 Siena poll of 238 presidential experts, with low ratings in economic management, communication, capacity to compromise, foreign policy accomplishments, and intelligence. Meanwhile, then-President Barack Obama was ranked 15th out of 43 candidates, with strong scores for imagination, communication ability, and IQ but a poor score for background (family, education, and experience).
The Institute for the Study of the Americas (based at the University of London’s School of Advanced Study) released the first ever United Kingdom academic survey to rate presidents in 2011, through the agency of its United States Presidency Centre (USPC). To assess presidential performance, this polled the opinions of British experts in American history and politics. They also issued an intermediate assessment of Barack Obama, but the survey did not include his incomplete administration. (If he’d been included, he’d have finished seventh overall.)
A panel of historians was asked by Newsweek magazine in 2012 to evaluate the ten best presidents since 1900. Historians ranked Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Woodrow Wilson, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama as the best presidents since that year, according to the findings.
When asked to score Obama’s presidency on an AF scale, 203 American historians gave him a B- in a 2013 History News Network poll. Obama received the highest marks in the categories of communication ability, honesty, and crisis management, and the lowest marks in the categories of relationship with Congress, transparency, and accountability, which historians scored using 15 independent indicators plus an aggregate grade.
The American Political Science Association (APSA) polled political scientists specializing in the American presidency in 2015, and Abraham Lincoln came out on top, followed by George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, Harry S. Truman, Dwight D. Eisenhower, Bill Clinton, Andrew Jackson, and Woodrow Wilson. In 2018, the APSA conducted a follow-up poll, with Donald Trump finishing last for the first time.
The Presidential History Network polled 71 British experts in 2016 and found Barack Obama to be in the first quartile, identical to the USPC poll from 2011.
The top five US presidents, according to a 2018 Siena poll of 157 presidential scholars, are George Washington, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Thomas Jefferson, with SCRI director Don Levy declaring, “The top five, Mount Rushmore plus FDR, is carved in granite with presidential historians…” For the first time, Donald Trump was included among the bottom five US presidents in the SCRI assessment, alongside Andrew Johnson, James Buchanan, Warren G. Harding, and Franklin Pierce. George W. Bush, who had been ranked in the bottom five by presidential scholars in the previous 2010 poll, has moved up to the bottom of the third quartile. A C-SPAN poll from 2021 continued Ulysses Grant’s ongoing rehabilitation, with Bush improving again again, Obama remaining high, and Trump towards the bottom.
Who is the fourth in line for the presidency?
In the President’s Cabinet, the Secretary is the highest-ranking official. After the Vice President, the Speaker of the House, and the President pro tempore of the Senate, the Secretary of State is the fourth in line of succession if the President resigns or dies.
Who was the 69th president of the United States?
Benjamin Harrison was nominated for President on the eighth vote of the Republican National Convention in 1888, and he led one of the first presidential campaigns “During his front-porch campaigns, he gave short addresses to visiting delegations in Indianapolis. Democrats dubbed him “Little Ben” because he was just 5 feet 6 inches tall; Republicans countered that he was tall enough to wear his grandfather’s “Old Tippecanoe” hat.
Harrison was born in 1833 on a farm near the Ohio River, just south of Cincinnati, and attended Miami University in Ohio before studying law in Cincinnati. He relocated to Indianapolis, where he practiced law and ran for office as a Republican candidate. In 1853, he married Caroline Lavinia Scott. He was Colonel of the 70th Volunteer Infantry after the Civil War. Harrison established himself as a pillar of the Indianapolis community, bolstering his image as a bright lawyer.
In 1876, he was defeated for Governor of Indiana by the Democrats, who wrongly branded him as a racist “Harrison wears Kid Gloves. He served in the United States Senate in the 1880s, advocating for Indians, homesteaders, and Civil War veterans.
Harrison garnered 100,000 fewer popular votes than Cleveland in the presidential election, but he won the Electoral College by a margin of 233 to 168. Despite the fact that Harrison had made no political concessions, his supporters had made numerous vows on his behalf.
When Pennsylvania Boss Matt Quay learned that Harrison attributed his tight victory to Providence, he shouted, “Harrison will never know.” “how many men were forced to approach… the jail in order to make him President.
Harrison was pleased of the aggressive foreign policy that he had a hand in shaping. In 1889, the first Pan American Congress convened in Washington, DC, to establish an information center that would later become the Pan American Union. Harrison submitted a pact to annex Hawaii to the Senate towards the end of his presidency, but President Cleveland later withdrew it, much to his chagrin.
Harrison signed significant appropriation legislation for internal improvements, naval expansion, and subsidies for steamship companies. Except in times of war, Congress appropriated a billion dollars for the first time. “This is a billion-dollar country,” Speaker Thomas B. Reed said to opponents of “the billion-dollar Congress.” The Sherman Anti-Trust Statute was also signed by President Harrison “The first Federal act aiming to control trusts was enacted to safeguard trade and commerce from unlawful restraints and monopolies.
The tariff issue was the most puzzling domestic issue Harrison faced. The high tariff rates had resulted in a cash surplus in the Treasury. Advocates for low tariffs claimed that the excess was hurting business. The challenge was addressed with success by Republican leaders in Congress. Representative William McKinley and Senator Nelson W. Aldrich crafted a new tariff bill with even higher rates, some of which were purposefully prohibitive.
Harrison attempted to make the tariff more palatable by including reciprocal clauses. To deal with the Treasury surplus, the tariff on imported raw sugar was lifted, and sugar growers in the United States were awarded a two-cent-per-pound bonus on their output.
The Treasury surplus was vanished long before the conclusion of the Harrison administration, and prosperity appeared to be on its way out as well. After a string of defeats in Congressional elections in 1890, Republican leaders opted to leave President Harrison, notwithstanding his cooperation with Congress on party legislation. Despite this, his party renominated him in 1892, but Cleveland defeated him.
Harrison returned to Indianapolis after leaving office and married the widowed Mrs. Mary Dimmick in 1896. He died in 1901, a dignified older statesman.
Is it possible for presidents to serve three terms?
Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice, and no person shall be elected to the office of President more than once if he or she has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which another person was elected President. However, this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President at the time this Article was proposed by Congress, and shall not prevent any person holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term in which this Article becomes operative from continuing to hold the office of President or acting as President for the remainder of that term.
Section 2. This Article will be ineffective unless it has been passed as an amendment to the Constitution by the legislatures of three-quarters of the states within seven years of the date of the Congress’s submission to the states.
Who was the youngest president in the United States?
Incoming US presidents are on average 55 years old when they are sworn in. The median age in years and days is 55 years and 104.5 days, which is roughly halfway between Warren G. Harding’s age in 1921 and Lyndon B. Johnson’s age in 1963.
Theodore Roosevelt, who became president at the age of 42 after William McKinley’s assassination, was the youngest individual to hold the office. John F. Kennedy, who was inaugurated at the age of 43, was the youngest president elected by popular vote. Joe Biden, who took the presidential oath of office 61 days after turning 78, was the oldest person to ever hold the post.
At the time of his assassination, John F. Kennedy was the youngest president in history, and his life span was the shortest of any president. Theodore Roosevelt was the youngest former president, at the age of 50. Ronald Reagan, at 77, was the oldest president at the end of his term; this honor would eventually pass to Joe Biden, who was older when he assumed office than Reagan was when he left. Four of Biden’s successors were born before him: Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.
President James K. Polk’s retirement was the shortest of any president’s, as he died only three months after leaving office at the age of 53. (the youngest president to die of natural causes). Jimmy Carter has announced his retirement.
How many presidents have been killed in assassination attempts?
In the history of the United States, four presidents have been assassinated in less than a century, starting with Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Attempts on the lives of two other Presidents, one President-elect, and one ex-President have also been made.
How did FDR manage to serve four terms?
President George Washington famously refused to run for re-election to a third term. It was because of his age, according to his Farewell Address, but his successors considered it as an essential protection against monarchy. However, because there were no explicit regulations in place regarding term limits, Roosevelt consented to run for a third and then fourth term when WWII broke out in Europe. In the 1944 election, he received 53 percent of the vote and won 36 states.
New York Governor Thomas Dewey declared near the close of the 1944 presidential campaign, “Four terms, or sixteen years, is the most deadly menace to our freedom ever offered,” and backed the passage of an amendment limiting future presidents to two terms. The 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951 after being passed in 1947.

