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Over the next few weeks, investors will be bombarded with commentary about how the outcome of the presidential election will influence the financial markets.Before you even consider changing your portfolio based on the expected-or actual-results of the election, its vital to analyze the conventional wisdom first.Is gridlock good-that is, should investors root against having the same political party control both Congress and the White House? Who is better for stock and bond returns: Republicans or Democrats?Most of the answers you are likely to find are propaganda or wishful thinking; many are flat-out wrong. What matters are changes in interest rates, not which party passes through the White House gates.Since 1926, when reliable stock-market data began, the United States has had 15 presidents and nine elections in which control of the White House passed from one party to the other. Thats a small sample. So you should take any statistical conclusion about the relationship between presidential election results and financial returns with a grain of salt the size of the Capitol dome.Such caveats wont stop pundits from speculating. One of their most prevalent beliefs: Gridlock is good for the stock market. (A Google GOOG -1.90% search returns 135,000 hits on the phrases gridlock is good + Wall Street.) And a divided Congress is what many political forecasters expect, with Pres. Obama winning re-election, the Democrats keeping the Senate and the Republicans retaining the House.A hard look at the evidence, however, shows that gridlock isnt good for stocks, says Robert Johnson, a finance professor at Creighton University in Omaha. In a working paper that covers 1965 through 2008, he and his colleagues found that gridlock had no effect on the returns of the big companies represented by the Standard Poors 500-stock index. Small stocks (as measured by Dimensional Fund Advisors small-company portfolios) returned an average of 21 percentage points less in years when