Presidential rankings tend to reward those on the left and penalize those on the right, which is where PragerU comes in.
The conservative education-and-media outlet said it sought to provide a “fuller, more balanced picture” with its first Presidential Rankings Survey, using a flexible methodology and including scholars, historians, media figures and politicians typically overlooked for such ratings despite their expertise.
“For decades, most presidential rankings have come from a narrow, left-leaning perspective,” said PragerU in its Sunday release. “Our Presidential Rankings Survey sets out to broaden the conversation by inviting voices and viewpoints that are often ignored.”
Richard Lim, PragerU senior editor and researcher, said, “We did this survey to provide people with a broader view.”
“We believe this is the first presidential rankings survey by a group that is overwhelmingly pro-American, that believes in the founding principles of this country, and that measures the performance of every president by those principles,” he said in the introductory video.
There were no surprises at the very top. Presidential icons George Washington and Abraham Lincoln were ranked first and second, as they almost always are even in surveys of liberal-leaning professors.
But on their heels was a president who rarely cracks the top 10 in such surveys: Republican Ronald Reagan.
“Conservative esteem for Reagan is very high – his average is close to Lincoln’s ranking,” said the PragerU analysis. “According to one respondent, Reagan ‘was a visionary whose moral clarity helped usher in the end of the Cold War.’”
Behind third-ranked Reagan was Calvin Coolidge, another conservative fave often slighted in presidential ratings, followed by Thomas Jefferson, Dwight Eisenhower, James Monroe, James Madison, John Adams and Theodore Roosevelt.
Meanwhile, modern Democrats tended to fare poorly. Bringing up the rear was Joseph R. Biden Jr., who ranked 42nd out of 42 presidents ranked, behind perennial basement-dwellers Andrew Johnson (40) and James Buchanan (41).
Also landing in the bottom 10 were Democrats Lyndon B. Johnson (35), Barack Obama (38) and Jimmy Carter (39).
Modern Democrats viewed more favorably included John F. Kennedy Jr. (18) and Bill Clinton (23), both of whom received higher rankings than Republicans Gerald Ford (27) and Richard Nixon (29).
The survey left out William Henry Harrison and James Garfield, saying that the brevity of their terms in office made it difficult to rate them fairly.
Also not included was Donald Trump, whose tenure is ongoing and “therefore cannot yet be judged on its totality,” the analysis said.
Who’s the best president?
Who’s the worst?
Check out our official presidential rankings and take the survey yourself to rank the presidents. https://t.co/xF3MwQU89g
— PragerU (@prageru) December 28, 2025
The survey’s 155 respondents were asked to rate every president on a scale of 0 to 10, keeping in mind four guidelines: adherence to the Constitution; national prosperity; sound foreign policy, and the “difficulty of the circumstances in which they served.”
“We essentially gave the respondent the freedom to decide how they would weight it themselves, and they would come up with an up-or-down, rather than giving them some rigid formula,” said Mr. Lim, who hosts the “This American President” podcast.
Some of the PragerU results offered a sharp contrast to the 2024 rankings of the Presidential Greatness Project, which was based on responses from 154 members of the American Political Science Association.
That survey enshrined Mr. Obama in the top 10 with a seventh-place finish, followed by Mr. Clinton (12), Reagan (16), and Carter (22). Mr. Biden came in 14th. In last place was Mr. Trump.
One of the biggest discrepancies with other surveys came with Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who landed 20th place with the,PragerU jury despite ranking #2 in the latest Presidential Greatness Project survey and almost always ranking in the Top 5.
That middle-of-the-pack result here resulted from the “love/hate” relationship that conservatives have with Democrat who led the Allies to victory in World War II but also founded the New Deal.
“If you rated FDR as a ‘war president,’ you’d give him a high mark; for the economy, a low mark,” said one respondent. “For me, that took him to an ‘average’ overall ranking.”
Allen Estrin, co-founder of PragerU, said the goal was to “give presidents the benefit of a different perspective” by bringing in new voices to the presidential-rankings debate.
Those who participated in the PragerU survey included Princeton professor Allen Guelzo; Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth; historian Amity Schlaes; former Vanderbilt professor Carol Swain; and University of California Berkeley law professor John Yoo.
“If you’re talking about presidents and comparing them, you’re involving yourself in American history, and that’s really what we want to do,” said Mr. Estrin in the video release. “Most of all, I think it’s just fun. It’s just fun to do the survey, to look at the results, and to talk about the presidents.”
The survey reached out to 535 individuals and received 155 replies, a 29% response rate.
