FiveThirtyEight’s New Hampshire Diary

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RINDGE — A few days ago, we hopped into our rented SUV (which features a heated steering wheel, but that’s for another post) and trekked south and west to a Bernie Sanders rally at Franklin Pierce University. On the way into the gymnasium (home of the Ravens), I took out my phone and became possibly the first person to ever Google “fun facts about Franklin Pierce.” The first result I got was a Mental Floss article listing five things you may not know about our 14th president. No. 1 fact about Pierce? “He is America’s most obscure president.” It goes:

Thirteenth president Millard Fillmore is generally regarded as America’s least-known president. That is a distinction Franklin Pierce lacks, making him even more obscure than Fillmore.

This, friends is a flawless pirouette of logic. And we’re buying it. See more But it got us thinking about whether there was any way to actually quantify who our most obscure president is. One data set that provides a clue is Sporcle’s online U.S. presidents quiz. More than 6.5 million people have played it so far, and it turns out, Pierce is pretty forgettable! Only 58.3 percent of respondents remembered New Hampshire’s only president. But Pierce is only the fourth-most-obscure president, according to this list. He’s practically a rock star compared with Warren G. Harding, Chester A. Arthur and … Rutherford B. Hayes. Remember him? Exactly.