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

Abstract

AbstractThis 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 115th Congress are about what should be expected with cohesive Republican majorities in both chambers.