Recently, Patrick Runkel wrote about using regression models to explain how historians ranked the U.S. presidents. Given that I both love regression and have written about using regression to predict U.S. presidential elections, I wanted to take Runkel up on his challenge to improve on his model.

My goal isn’t merely to predict the eventual ranking for any president. Instead, I’m much more interested in a fascinating question behind this analysis. Is the public’s contemporary assessment of the president consistent with the historical perspective, or do they differ?

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