How to Use
Party Lines
The economic and social record of the United States since 1929, set beside who held the White House, the House, and the Senate, so you can check the claims you hear against the numbers.
- Years
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- Charts
- 80
- Administrations
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- Scored Indicators
- 35
Who Held Power
What It Is
The Who Held Power bands above give, month by month, the President's party and the majority party in each chamber of Congress, and every shaded chart takes its colors from them. They open with Hoover's inauguration in March 1929 because the government's official GDP figures begin that year. A band shows which party held a branch, not by how much: a one-seat majority is shaded the same as a two-thirds one.
Each indicator joins when its record begins, such as the S&P 500 in 1957 or student debt in 2006, so its chart says nothing about the presidents before. Most Society series come once a year, some by a fiscal year that starts in October, so one reading can span two presidents. The numbers come from their publishers, mostly federal agencies, and party control from the National Archives and the historians of the House and Senate. Sources names the publisher and series behind every chart, so you can check any number yourself.
What It Is Not
A verdict on which party runs the country better.
partylines.org picks no side and backs no candidate. Vote how you like, or don't. Either way, know the record.
How to Read It
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1Economics and Society
The site has two pages of cards, one for the economy and one for society, each headed by Current Political Conditions: who holds the White House, the House, and the Senate. A card gives an indicator's latest reading, how far it has moved and since when, and ten years of its line shaded by the President's party. On a scored indicator, green is better news and orange worse. One reading can be noise; the ten-year line shows whether it is a trend.
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2New Data
For seven days after a new reading arrives, its card lights its edges and says Updated under its date; the explainer cards carry no mark. When an agency revises a reading the site had already posted, the card lights the same way and says Revised. On a wider screen the top of the page counts both. Treat a new number as a first draft: many agencies revise recent readings as fuller reports come in.
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3Four Panels
Most charts draw the same line four times, shaded by who held the White House, the House, and the Senate, and last by whether one party held all three, a trifecta. Only the shading changes, so compare all four before pinning a pattern on one branch: Congress writes the laws a President signs.
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4The Info Button
The ⓘ beside a chart's name opens a short note: what the indicator measures, who publishes it, why it matters, and how much politics can move it. Read that last part before assigning credit or blame: gas prices follow the world oil market, and mortgage rates the bond market.
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5The Colors
Red is Republican control, blue is Democratic, and purple means power was split. Gray bands mark recessions, on every timeline and on the charts the business cycle moves. The National Bureau of Economic Research dates each one after the fact, so a recession can be under way before its band appears.
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6Policy Lag
The Policy Lag credits each month to whoever held power that many months earlier, from 0 to 36, on the charts and in Rankings. At 12, a new President's first year still goes to the one before. Policy takes months to years to show up, and the delay varies, so no setting is right: a pattern worth trusting holds up as the lag moves.
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7Compare
Most charts have a Compare button. Compare sets up to four indicators, Economics or Society, on one timeline, each in its own units: stacked, or on a wider screen two by two. One Shaded By and one Policy Lag bind every panel, and no panel has a setting of its own. A chart's four panels show all four shadings at once; Compare shows one at a time, so switch Shaded By through President, House, Senate, and Trifecta before pinning a pattern on one branch.
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8Rankings
Rankings orders each scored indicator best to worst: on Configuration across the four configurations of power (a trifecta for either party, or divided government under either party's President), and on Administration across the presidents that Compare From or Pick Presidents puts in view. Each card names the best, the worst, and the spread between them. A card ranks only when everyone in view has enough data; otherwise it says Not Ranked, is crossed with fine lines, and counts toward no one. Each tile counts its Best and Worst in Economics and in Society separately.
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9The Term View
The Term view takes one presidency at a time: each indicator's change from the last reading before it took office to the last before its successor did, and where that placed among the presidents. A change in points or years is placed by its pace per year, printed beside it on the card. Every term starts where the last one ended, so a President who arrives in a slump has room to climb, and one who arrives at a peak has room to fall. Strongest and Weakest come only from indicators that rank at least half of all terms, so a first place among a handful never leads a term's card.
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10What Gets Scored
An indicator is scored only when its better direction is not in dispute, such as lower unemployment, faster real growth, longer lives, or less crime. Inflation is scored by its distance from the Federal Reserve's 2% target, since too little can hurt as well as too much. Deficits, taxes, trade, most immigration measures, the imprisonment rate, births per woman, and a few others are charted but not scored: whether more is better depends on the moment and on your values, and that judgment is yours.
The Three Branches
The President
- Signs or vetoes every spending and tax bill; overriding a veto takes two thirds of both chambers.
- Proposes a budget each year, but Congress writes the one that becomes law.
- Sets tariffs under powers Congress has delegated, negotiates trade deals, and directs how agencies write and enforce rules.
- Nominates the Federal Reserve's chair and governors, but since 1951 the Fed has set interest rates independently of the White House.
The House of Representatives
- Must originate every tax bill under the Constitution, and by custom starts the yearly spending bills.
- Passes bills by simple majority, and the majority party decides what reaches the floor.
- Its yearly spending bills cover defense and agency budgets; Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and interest on the debt keep flowing under laws already on the books.
The Senate
- Passes, amends, or blocks every spending and tax bill.
- Confirms the cabinet, the Federal Reserve's chair and governors, and federal judges, who serve for life.
- Needs 60 votes to end debate on most bills, so a party without 60 senators can pass most party-line bills only through budget reconciliation, which is limited to spending, taxes, and the debt limit.
Sources
Each row names who publishes the numbers and the table or series they come from, so you can look any of them up. The rows computed here say so.
Labor
Prices & Rates
Markets & Output
Income & Wealth
Taxes
Fiscal
Trade
Cycle
Health
Education
Crime & Justice
Poverty & Family
Aging
Immigration
Explainers
The Record
Notes
Caveats
Every chart and ranking credits each month to whoever held power, so each shows what happened on whose watch, not who caused it. None of it adjusts for oil prices, pandemics, downturns abroad, the Federal Reserve, or trends a term inherited, and state and local governments run most policing, prisons, and schools. The samples are small, so one crisis can decide a ranking: narrow the Rankings window to leave it out and see whether the order holds.
Coverage
Data begins in …. Agencies publish on their own schedules, so each chart ends where its own latest release does, and Rankings carries a quarterly or yearly reading forward until the next. Most Society series come out once a year, some a year or two after the year they describe. Agencies also revise past figures, and the site takes each agency's revisions as they are published. A reading says Provisional only where its publisher has measured a newer year than its final tables print: NCHS's provisional figures, and the years the site counts from Census survey microdata before Census prints them. A monthly or quarterly figure an agency calls preliminary, such as the newest payroll count, carries no mark. The site checks for new releases every evening and last added data on …; an update that fails its checks is discarded, and the previous data stays live.
Estimates
A month an agency never published, such as October 2025, when a government shutdown stopped its surveys, is drawn between the months either side. A series once published only by year, such as unemployment before 1948, has its months estimated along the smoothest path that averages to each year's figure, so read those stretches by the year. A survey taken every few years, such as the eighth-grade tests, is read on a straight line between its readings. A chart says Estimate when you point at an estimated month, and in Rankings, Administration and the Term view say it beside a change that starts or ends on one; Configuration marks none.
Disclaimers
- FRED
- This product uses the FRED® API but is not endorsed or certified by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.
- BLS
- BLS.gov cannot vouch for the data or analyses derived from these data after the data have been retrieved from BLS.gov.
- BEA
- This product uses the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) Data API but is not endorsed or certified by BEA.
- Census Bureau
- This product uses the Census Bureau Data API but is not endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.
Tips
Party Lines is a public service: free, with no ads and no sponsors, built and run by one developer. If it helped you see the record for yourself, you can tip the developer. Tips are not tax-deductible and never have influence over site content.