Someone finally asked Americans if they knew who was president when

One of the central questions of American politics at the moment is a complicated one: Who was actually president when bad things happened?

Who, for example, was president when the country instituted restrictions meant to curtail the spread of the coronavirus? Who was president when special counsel Robert Mueller was appointed? These are complicated questions that no one can really answer. (Try your luck at doing so!)

Given how hard it is to know what exactly happened three or four years ago, the team at YouGov decided to put Americans to the test. Presented with 20 major events over the course of the past four presidencies, how often could average people actually identify the sitting president at the time? Could they succeed where so many pundits and sitting presidents have failed?

The answer, I’m pleased to say, is yes. Out of those 20 events, a plurality of Americans identified the correct sitting president 19 times. We’re grading on a bit of a curve here, since there were some events (like the 2008 bank bailout) where most respondents, not just a plurality, weren’t sure when exactly it occurred. Other than that, though, we (Americans) did OK.

What was the one event where Americans were more likely to guess the wrong president than the correct one? The Supreme Court’s 2022 decision to reverse Roe v. Wade. Instead of correctly identifying Joe Biden as the president when that happened, a plurality (and nearly a majority) instead attributed it to the guy who made it happen, Donald Trump.

In fact, it’s interesting to consider not just how often Americans correctly identified the sitting president but also to see who they incorrectly thought was in the White House when these events occurred. Below, you can see the distribution of answers (among those who didn’t say “not sure”).

On some (9/11, Obamacare), there’s little question. On others, like the Flint water crisis, no one seems to be really sure at all.

It is also interesting to compare responses by party. There’s a pattern here: partisans are more likely to say that a negative event occurred under one of the opposing party’s presidents. (See “start of the Great Recession,” for example, or “Ukraine invaded.”) Even so, a plurality of partisans on both sides were still generally able to identify the correct president for each event, except for the repeal of Roe.

There are also divides by age, as you might expect. Younger people, with fewer political events to remember, often did a better job identifying the correct president. (Notice how often the purple circles extend outside the orange ones for incorrect answers below.)

In fact, respondents aged 18 to 29 were the only age group to correctly identify Biden as the president when Roe was overturned — though only by a hair.

Anyway, the important takeaway here is that, for the most part, Americans actually do know who was president when major events happened and, therefore, who deserves credit or blame should such assignments be important. Sure, partisans try to shift things toward or away from their own team, but overall adults in the U.S. got the answer right.

If only pundits and the president were so adept.

Photo: The White House. (Chuck Kennedy/National Archives)