Who was the best US president?

For a while now I’ve been running a daily presidential tier list over on Notes — with everyone voting on rankings of S through F. We’ve just reached Lincoln, which puts us about a third of the way through the line of presidents, and it feels like the right moment to step back and look at how the early republic graded out.

It’s also a natural breakpoint for a deeper reason. Lincoln is the last president elected under the first version of the American republic. Before the Civil War, the United States was less a nation than a confederation of Anglo settler colonies, aspirationally held together by a continental elite. The war reshaped all of it — and turned that loose arrangement into a genuine nation, bloodied and forged in the flame of war.

The republic that emerged lasted until roughly the FDR administration: an order dominated by liberal Yankee industrialists who believed in high tariffs, domestic development, and a strong federal government — strong, at least, by the standards of the time. So this is the first of three roundups. I’ll do another once we get through FDR and the second republic, and a final one when we reach the present, under the postwar presidencies.

The format is simple. Each president gets rated S, A, B, C, or F. To turn letters into numbers, I mapped them onto a five-point scale: S = +2, A = +1, B = 0, C = −1, F = −2. Average that across every vote and each president gets a score. Here’s how they rank, with error bars showing plus or minus one standard deviation.

This looks about right to me. Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson sit at the top. Jackson lands in the dead middle with enormous error bars. And Martin Van Buren, Franklin Pierce, and James Buchanan bring up the rear.

Plotted across time, the story is a gradual decline in quality, with Polk and Lincoln the only real exceptions to the slide.

Of course, not every president inspires the same intensity of feeling. Who, in 2026, holds a truly strong opinion about Millard Fillmore? So if you switch from the average score to the absolute totals — simply summing every vote rather than averaging — you get a ranking weighted by how much people care.

What’s interesting is how little it changes. The only real movement: Polk overtakes Jefferson for third, and William Henry Harrison falls substantially — the victim of a great pile of C votes.

Here’s the full split of votes for each president, plus a few thoughts on each.

The most lopsided result in the whole poll: 79% S. That tracks the historical and public conception well, since he is the father of our nation and truly a “Great” man. Little decent here from me.

Historians almost always rank Lincoln first or tied for it, my audience had a somewhat wider spread, 9% giving him an F. Still his spot in second isn’t surprising.

Jefferson has become more controversial in recent years due to his status as a slave owner, and the children he had with Sally Hemings. Still he was a transformational president and the Louisiana Purchase doubled the size of our country.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Polk. He is one of the only politicians in history to set out a clear set of goals, accomplish them, and then retire. I also happen to generally support his goals, the Mexican Cession, the Oregon settlement, a lower tariff, and an independent treasury.