Trump vs. Obama: Who has the better record on the economy?

As the campaign enters the home stretch, President Trump’s main closing argument is that he deserves four more years because he oversaw “the greatest economy in the history of our country.”

But even looking at the three years before COVID-19 made a mess of things, the U.S. economy under Trump performed about the same as it had during the last three years under President Obama. On some economic measures, it was a little worse, on others a little better — but on the whole, not markedly different. And it was a far cry from the best ever.

Consider: Under Obama from 2014 to 2016, real gross domestic product — the broadest measure of economic activity — grew at an average annual rate of 2.5%. In Trump’s first three years, 2017 to 2019, real GDP expanded by an annual average of 2.6%, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

In December 2017 , Trump had talked about GDP rocketing to “4, 5, and maybe even 6% or higher.” But despite his big corporate tax cut, GDP growth didn’t come close to reaching the average yearly gains of 4% in the 1990s and twice that in the early 1950s.

On Thursday the government will release the third-quarter GDP report, which is expected to show a strong recovery from the 31.4% plunge in the prior quarter. Still, for the year as a whole, GDP is projected to fall close to 4% thanks to the pandemic, the sharpest drop in about 75 years.

On employment, the U.S. economy added 6.6 million jobs in Trump’s first three years, shy of the 8.1 million payroll gains in the last three years under Obama.

Trump has often bragged about his record on production jobs, which has particular appeal to his working-class base and to voters in the Midwest. But even here, the difference isn’t much at all.

From the end of 2016 to the close of 2019, the nation added 1.27 million jobs in the blue-collar industries of construction and manufacturing, although factory jobs flattened in 2019 thanks in part to Trump’s trade war with China. That compared with 1.13 million construction and manufacturing jobs gained from 2014 to 2016, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

It’s true that the nation’s unemployment rate fell to a half-century low of 3.5% before the coronavirus outbreak in March, and that jobless figures for Latinos, Blacks and Asians also dropped to the lowest level on record. But economists note that the actual change in unemployment rates over their respective three-year periods was bigger under Obama than under Trump.

In recent months, the Trump campaign has talked about how American household incomes rose faster during Trump’s first three years in office than during the entire eight-year period under Obama. That’s technically correct — median income, adjusted for inflation, went up 5.8% from 2008 to 2016 versus 7.8% from 2016 to 2019, according to the Census Bureau.

But that doesn’t take into account that Obama and Vice President Joe Biden entered office in the middle of the Great Recession. It wasn’t until 2013 that household income stopped bleeding and a recovery began.

Looking at just the last three years of the Obama administration, median income grew by 8.4%, a slightly faster pace than…