Been seeing a lot of takes lately about how the stock market performs better under one political party or another, especially with the election cycle heating up. So I decided to dig into the actual stock market performance by president chart going back to 1957 when the S&P 500 was created.

Here's where it gets interesting. If you look at average returns during Democratic presidencies, you get 9.8% annually. Republicans? 6%. Sounds like a pretty clear winner, right? Except when you flip to median returns, suddenly Republicans are at 10.2% and Democrats drop to 8.9%. So technically both parties can point at the same data and claim the stock market performs better under their watch. That's not a mistake in the analysis—it's just how statistics work sometimes.

The historical stock market performance by president chart tells you something important though. Since 1957, the S&P 500 has compounded at about 7.4% annually overall. That's across multiple recessions, wars, pandemics, and every political combination you can imagine. The dot-com bubble didn't care who was president. Neither did the 2008 financial crisis or COVID. Markets crashed anyway.

Here's the thing that gets overlooked: presidents don't actually control the stock market directly. Yeah, fiscal policy matters, but Congress writes the budget. And honestly, business fundamentals—earnings growth, revenue, innovation—drive stock prices way more than whatever's happening in the Oval Office. When you factor in dividends and look at the past 30 years, the S&P 500 returned around 1,920% compounded at 10.5% annually. That's across both parties holding power, through boom and bust cycles.

The real lesson from looking at stock market performance by president data isn't that one party is better for your portfolio. It's that patient investors who stay invested through multiple election cycles tend to do fine regardless. The market doesn't care about campaign promises. It cares about earnings reports, innovation, and whether companies can grow. That's been true for nearly 70 years and probably will be for the next 70.

So when you hear politicians claiming they're better for the market, just remember what the actual chart shows. Both sides have years where markets thrived and years where they tanked. The real money gets made by investors who ignore the noise and focus on the long game.