Contemporary Presidency: Which Presidents Are Uncommonly Successful in Congress? A Trump Update

Abstract

This article updates previous research that seeks to identify which presidents won more or fewer roll-call votes than should be expected through Trump's first two years in office. Multiple regression models estimating the effects of key contextual variables known to influence roll-call voting in Congress (party control, public approval, and party polarization plus interactions) establish a common baseline of predicted success. The errors reveal which presidents won more or less than should be expected given the political context. Consistent with earlier studies using different model specifications analyzing earlier periods and presidents, this updated analysis is unable to reject the null hypothesis that the errors are random, and we observe no more unusual outliers than would be expected to occur by chance. Trump's high success rates in the 115 th Congress are about what should be expected with cohesive Republican majorities in both chambers.

The Contemporary Presidency: Which presidents win more or less than expected in Congress? A Biden update

“…7 Table 1 reports results of the regression analysis of annual presidential success rates from 1953 to 2022 (N = 70 years). Results are similar to earlier iterations analyzing fewer presidents (Bond, 2019b;Cohen et al, 2013aCohen et al, , 2013bFleisher et al, 2008;Teodoro & Bond, 2017). 8 These regression models estimate predicted success relative to a common baseline of contextual variables known to influence roll-call voting in Congress.…”

“…The label "polar opposite" political styles is not based on a quantitative metric. Yet numerous examples illustrate how Trump's behavior is well outside the normal range observed of past presidents (seeBond, 2019b). Since his behavior is antithetical of any president we have studied, "polar opposite" seems to be a reasonable, if unmeasured, characterization.…”

“…As a result of these changes, success rates and the nature of issues on which the president expresses positions are no longer comparable across chambers. Because the president's position (support) prevails on more than 95% of confirmation votes, presidential success rates in the Senate may be artificially inflated relative to those in the House (Bond, 2019b). Early research analyzing presidential success excluded near-unanimous votes to minimize potential distortion (Bond & Fleisher, 1990;Edwards, 1989).…”

The Immigration Rhetoric of Donald Trump

“…Recent scholarly evaluations of Trump's relationship with Congress reveal a contradictory picture of his success in Congress and the extent to which his leadership skills influenced any legislative victories. Trump's success on roll‐call votes was better than predicted (Bond 2019a), and his success rate in 2017 was the highest of any recent president (CQ Almanac 2017). Indeed, the data show a high rate of success for Trump in Congress before the 2018 midterm elections, generating an overall success rate of 98.3% in 2017 and 93.4% in 2018, according to Congressional Quarterly's analysis of roll‐call votes.…”

Was Donald Trump an Effective Leader of Congress?

“…The increasingly conservative views of Republican senators and the president’s support among their constituents are the most likely explanations. Jon Bond found that Trump did about what one would expect in the political environment in which he operated (Bond 2019).…”