Obama's Place in History

It's Inauguration Day, and our 44th president, Barack Obama, will be leaving office after serving two terms. As often happens with the end of an era, pundits and journalists start considering the president's legacy. Paul Djupe and I wrote an analysis for FiveThirtyEight of where Obama is likely to rank among historians and political scientists, particularly looking at the relationship between final job approval ratings and future scholarly rankings. We predict that he might land about 12th in the coming years, a slight improvement over where he was ranked a few years ago.