Who Created More Jobs, Democrats or Republicans?
Who created more jobs, Democrats or Republicans? We find out.
In this analysis we’ll look at which party, based on president, created more jobs. We must point out that how the economy performs is typically out of the control of the president. For a more detailed analysis of this see this analysis and this analysis.
Methodology
In order to identify which presidents, produce the most jobs we needed to control for a few factors. First and foremost, mean reversion. Under Trump we saw a decline in jobs due to the pandemic, with many of these people returning to the same jobs under Biden when restrictions were lifted. In this case we did not count a job as ‘being created’, the job already existed. In this case we only counted the additional jobs created beyond the previous president’s high.
Second, in order to create a good relative comparison, we need to control for years in office and used an annualized average. In example, Clinton created 15 million jobs in 8 years, while W. Bush created 9.3 million jobs in 4 years. In an absolute analysis it would appear that Clinton outperformed H.W. Bush until you realize H.W. Bush produced his number of jobs in just one half the time as Clinton. Using the relative method of annualization demonstrates that H.W. Bush actually outperformed, or 2.3 million jobs annually to Clintons 1.9 jobs annually.
Results
After downloading the data from the BLS we applied our methodology as described above. First, we did this by only doing this analysis on president Clinton and after, a point that many modern political pundits prefer to review. When doing this limited review of the jobs data we find that Democrats added both more jobs and more jobs annually.
 |  |
However, this is a rather disingenuous timeframe to review the data. The modern political era typically goes back farther, to 1980 or Reagan’s term as described here.
When we used this more scandalized view we found that Reagan added the most jobs of any president in the modern era with Clinton close behind.
When we annualized these numbers, we found that W. Bush created the most jobs annually.
If we total the numbers by party we find that Republicans created 33.2 million jobs versus Democrats 27.7 million jobs.
This isn’t a fair relative look at the numbers. In order to make a good relative comparisons we broke these into annualized numbers. In this case we found that Republicans created 6.2 million jobs to Democrats 3.9 million jobs.
