History Shows Stocks, GDP Outperform Under Democrats
http://www.foxbusiness.com/investing/2012/09/04/history-shows-markets-gdp-outperform-under-democrats/
Democrats of today is different from the past. Profits are up due to deep cuts in corporations.
It's a fact of political life that Presidents get blame or credit for economic performance, but it doesn't historically have a lot to do with economic reality because Congress actually governs the budget and tax system. Extraneous events have a huge amount to do with it, as well - for instance the rocket-like growth of internet commerce in the 90s owed virtually nothing to Bill Clinton, if anything you could say it went back to Reagan's DARPA funding of the research that underlay it, but he gets credit as some kind of economic wizard because of it. Then there are wars, which produce a lot of economic activity, much of it not productive or counterproductive to consumers, but productive by economic measurement, and Democrats have been in power when we went to war a lot more often than Republicans for the past hundred years, generally with a change in power along with the subsequent demobilization and statistical economic slumps afterward. History also isn't a reliable indicator of future performance a variety of reasons that shift the basis for comparison over time, ranging from the one you identify (Change in what the parties stand for and their constituencies over time) to issues like the massively larger role regulatory agencies play now versus 40 or 50 years ago.
