It's the economy, stupid.
That was how Bill Clinton singled out economic conditions as the most important issue in his 1992 presidential election campaign. Eight years earlier, candidate Ronald Reagan asked: "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?"
Today, some eight years after the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression, the nation's economy is once again central to both parties' appeal to voters.
For presumptive GOP nominee Donald Trump, that means tapping into the financial anxiety weighing on middle-class voters. "It's not just the political system that's rigged, it's the whole economy," he told supporters in New York last month. "It's rigged against you, the American people.
Harkening back to the booming economy of the 1990s during the Clinton administration, presumptive Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton said in May that she would put her husband "in charge of revitalizing the economy ... Because, you know, he knows how to do it."
For his part, President Barack Obama has vigorously defended his economic record over the last eight years.
"Anybody who says we are not absolutely better off today than we were just seven years ago — they're not leveling with you," he said in February. "They're not telling the truth. By almost every economic measure, we are significantly better off."
As American voters measure candidates based on how well off they feel and how confident they are about the future, CNBC.com analyzed the economic records of the last six presidents to better assess their performance. We looked at a variety of measures, calculating the net change from the start of a president's term to the end, beginning with Jimmy Carter's inauguration in January 1977.
Here are a dozen charts showing what we found.