# Who is the most overrated U.S. president in American history?

> Reputations move. A president near the top of every school textbook is exactly the kind of name this question is looking for.

*By YPB Team · Published August 12, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/who-is-the-most-overrated-us-president-in-american-history*

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## Current results (0 votes)

1. **John F. Kennedy**
   Ranks near the top of most public polls on barely a thousand days in office.
2. **Woodrow Wilson**
   Idealised for the League of Nations, and re-examined hard for everything else.
3. **Andrew Jackson**
   Celebrated for a century as the people's president, and judged very differently now.
4. **Theodore Roosevelt**
   The energy and the anecdotes are undisputed; historians argue about how much actually changed.
5. **Thomas Jefferson**
   Wrote the country's founding sentence and spent a presidency complicating it.
6. **Franklin D. Roosevelt**
   Twelve years, four elections and a reputation that leaves little room for the criticism.
7. **Abraham Lincoln**
   Sits at number one on nearly every list, which is itself a reason people argue about him.
8. **Dwight D. Eisenhower**
   The quiet decade gets credit that the decade itself may not have earned.
9. **James K. Polk**
   A historians' favourite for doing exactly what he promised, whatever that turned out to mean.
10. **Calvin Coolidge**
   Remembered for silence and prosperity, and for what followed the prosperity.
11. **John Adams**
   A founder whose single term is often graded on the founding rather than the term.
12. **James Monroe**
   Gave his name to a doctrine he did not write and an era he mostly presided over.
13. **Ulysses S. Grant**
   Rehabilitated so thoroughly in recent decades that the correction may have overshot.

Tags: historical-figures, usa, presidents