About

Overview

POTUS Economic Scorecard is an interactive web app that compares economic performance across presidential administrations. Pick an indicator, a reference point, and a set of presidents, and the app charts each presidency on a common day-zero axis so the terms line up side by side.

Eleven indicators are available:

Markets (charted as percent change from the reference date)

• S&P 500
• Dow Jones Industrial Average
• NASDAQ Composite
• US Dollar Index

Economic indicators (charted as absolute values)

• Unemployment Rate
• Inflation Rate (year-over-year CPI)
• 10-Year Treasury Yield
• Case-Shiller Home Price Index
• Real GDP
• Federal Debt to GDP Ratio
• Labor Force Participation Rate

Indicators start at different points in history, so not every one covers all 19 presidencies. Presidents the selected indicator cannot cover are dimmed in the sidebar, and selecting only uncovered presidents shows a message explaining when the series begins.

Features

• Eleven Economic Indicators: Four market indices and seven economic series.
• Flexible Reference Points: Choose between “Inauguration Day” and “Day Before Election” as day zero.
• Party Filtering: Filter presidents by political party.
• Customizable Time Period: Adjust the number of days shown, from 10 to 1460.
• Data Export: Download the chart as a PNG or the underlying series as a CSV.

How It Works

Historical data is downloaded daily by a GitHub Actions workflow and committed to the repository as JSON, one file per indicator. The page loads only the indicator you select and does all of the indexing and charting in the browser, so it renders in about a second.

For market indices, each presidency is indexed to its first observation on or after the reference date and plotted as percent change from that value. For the economic indicators, absolute values are plotted directly.

Data Sources

• Market data (S&P 500, Dow Jones, NASDAQ, US Dollar Index) comes from Yahoo Finance.
• Economic indicators come from FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data).

Technology

This application is built using:

• Observable JS and Observable Plot for the interactive chart, which runs entirely in the browser with no server and no R.
• Quarto for website publishing.
• R, with quantmod and jsonlite, for the daily data pipeline.

Local Deployment

To run the site locally:

1. Clone the repository:

   git clone https://github.com/jhelvy/potus-econ-scorecard.git
   cd potus-econ-scorecard

2. Refresh the data (optional – the repository already carries a recent copy):

   Rscript get_data.R

3. Preview the site:

   quarto preview

Contributing

Contributions are welcome! Please feel free to submit a Pull Request.

1. Fork the repository
2. Create your feature branch (git checkout -b feature/amazing-feature)
3. Commit your changes (git commit -m 'Add some amazing feature')
4. Push to the branch (git push origin feature/amazing-feature)
5. Open a Pull Request

License

This project is licensed under a CC-BY-SA-4.0 license - see the LICENSE file for details.