Most Popular U.S. Presidents By Current Americans

 

These results are from surveys done by the YouGov Poll during the fourth quarter of 2025.

Can An Unpopular Authoritarian Succeed In Grabbing Power?

The following is most of a post by economist Paul Krugman: 

As G. Elliott Morris points out in Strength in Numbers, what stands out in Trump’s polling isn’t just that a majority of Americans disapprove of Trump, but that almost half the country strongly disapproves.

The Trump administration is obviously attempting to follow the familiar playbook by which autocracies consolidate their power, effectively turning America into a one-party state where almost everyone accepts that resistance to the regime is futile and is afraid to show any signs of opposition.

And by and large America’s elites have offered no more resistance to authoritarian consolidation than a wet Kleenex. But historically, anti-democratic parties that establish lasting autocracies have done so with considerable initial support from the broader public. At least at first, they’re actually popular, especially because they deliver, or seem to deliver, major economic gains.

That’s not happening for Trump, at all. And the big question — to which I don’t know the answer — is whether a regime that inherited a good economy but ruined it and whose non-economic policies are deeply unpopular can still consolidate autocratic rule.

Let’s consider a couple of historical examples.

Adolf Hitler came to power in large part because the previous government insisted on following orthodox, deflationary economic policies in the face of the Great Depression. Hitler’s willingness to embrace heterodox policies helped Germany stage a strong recovery.

As a result, the Nazi regime was probably quite popular in its early years, when a public backlash might still have mattered.

Fast forward to 2010, when Viktor Orban took power in Hungary. At the time, the Hungarian economy was deeply depressed, in part because of austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund. Orban sent the IMF packing, and was able to preside over rapid economic improvement.

By contrast, Trump inherited an economy in good shape — even if the vibes were bad — and appears to be running it into the ground.

And all indications are that consumers will soon begin to see large price increases caused by Trump’s tariffs and, eventually, deportations.

Greg Sargent reports about one recent poll that asked likely voters how tariffs have affected their personal economic situation: 48 percent say that they have hurt, while only 8 percent say they have helped.

Can Trump compensate for the public’s dismal view of his economic policies by playing up culture-war issues like hostility to immigrants and anti-vaccine sentiment? Alas for Trump, these issues actually work against him. Belief that immigration is a good thing for America has hit a record high:

Roughly speaking, the American public doesn’t support anything Trump is doing. Yet he has been governing as if he has an overwhelming mandate to do whatever he wants, and to a large extent has been getting away with it. How is he managing that?

Part of the answer is anticipatory compliance on the part of members of the elite, from corporate CEOs to university presidents to law partners. Many of our institutions have been giving in to demands that Trump clearly has no legal right to make, out of fear of the consequences if they don’t.

Part of the answer is that Trump keeps declaring various kinds of emergency, then claiming that he has extraordinary powers to respond to these supposed emergencies.

Lower courts keep ruling against these claimed powers. For example, two courts have now declared Trump’s invocation of the International Economic Emergency Powers Act — the basis for 70 percent of Trump’s tariffs — illegal. But the Supreme Court keeps overturning these lower-court rulings, as it just did in allowing ICE to resume indiscriminate stops in Los Angeles based on nothing more than ethnicity.

But are cowardly elites and a compliant Supreme Court that keeps granting emergency powers enough to let a president who has not yet established a widespread climate of fear, who has low and declining public support, consolidate his position as autocrat?

Honestly, I have no idea. But I guess we’re going to find out.

The Ten Most Popular Democrats And Republicans

 

From the YouGov Poll on Democrats and Republicans.

U.S. Presidents (Ranked By Popularity Of Current Public)

 

Popularity Of Former U.S. Presidents

 

These charts use results from the YouGov Poll.

Trump's Nightmare Is Coming True - He's Being Ignored

The following op-ed is by David Byler in The Washington Post:

In the past two presidential elections, Donald Trump had a not-so-secret weapon: control over the news cycle. Trump could, with an inflammatory tweet or unscheduled speech, grab political reporters by the prefrontal cortex and direct their coverage toward the topic of his choosing.

But he might not have that gift in 2024. Three data points tell the story.

The first comes from cable TV.

Trump tried to focus the media on himself throughout the fall of 2022 — first by repeatedly teasing his 2024 presidential run, then by announcing it on Nov. 16. More recently, Trump dined with white nationalist Nick Fuentes and rapper Ye (the former Kanye West, who has made virulent antisemitic comments), and just a few days ago called for “terminating” the Constitution.

None of it yielded the media attention that Trump craves.

In the months leading up to Trump’s announcement, he was often ignored or hit with tough coverage. Fox News — home to numerous conservative commentators — did not talk about him much. And MSNBC, the progressive hub of cable news, covered him most in August — when the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-A-Lago home for classified documents.

Trump’s Nov. 16 announcement speech didn’t garner much coverage, either. MSNBC didn’t broadcast his announcement. Fox News briefly cut away from his live remarks. And, though the cable news covered Trump’s meeting with Ye and Fuentes, the event didn’t create a spike in Trump’s November mentions. It’s still too early to tell whether Trump’s “termination” comments about the Constitution moved the needle.

But the data we have suggest that Trump has lost command of the cable news cycle — and he might be losing his grip on the average news consumer, too. Two more data points:

Despite Trump’s best efforts, Americans paid much less attention to him in 2022 than they did when he was president. And when Trump scrambled for attention, he was only one story — not the story — of the moment.

In terms of Google’s search index, Trump’s announcement was a tad more interesting than the mad rush for Taylor Swift tickets and much less grabby than a big soccer tournament. And his dinner with Ye and Fuentes, so far, seems to be a non-event.

Trump still holds advantages in his attempt to recapture the White House. He is leading Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis by nearly double digits in the RealClearPolitics average of Republican presidential primary polls. And he is still the biggest name in Republican politics: Trump’s announcement speech generated far more Google searches for him than DeSantis’s blowout reelection did for him.

But Trump isn’t new or exciting anymore — and he can’t bend media coverage toward himself at will. If he wants to win another term, he will have to do it the old-fashioned way: by touting his record as president, building a coalition and relying on TV just a little less.

Poll Shows Popularity Of The Senators In Their Home State

The following is from the Morning Consult Poll. They surveyed 533,985 registered voters in all of the fifty states between July 1st and September 30th. The results show the popularity of each senator in his/her home state.

The Most Admired Men And Women In World And U.S.

The YouGov Poll has released their annual list of the most admired men and women in the world, and in the United States.

Bill Gates was the most admired man in the world, followed closely by Barack Obama. Mr. Obama was the most admired in the United States.

Michelle Obama was the most admired women in both the world and the United States.

Methodology

In December YouGov gathered open-ended nominations from panelists across 41 countries, asking them simply: “Thinking about people alive in the world today, which [man or woman] do you most admire?” These nominations were then used to compile a list of the 20 men and 20 women who received the most nominations and were nominated in at least four countries. An additional 10 popular local figures were added to the lists for individual countries. 

In January we then used the lists to poll each of the 41 countries asking two questions: “who do you truly admire?”, where respondents could make multiple selections, and “who do you MOST admire?”, where they could only pick one. These two numbers were combined into a percentage share of admiration, displayed to the right of each name in the graphic above.

The Most Popular Political Figures In The U.S. Are . . .

The YouGov Poll has been questioning nearly 5,000 respondents since November of 2017 through the current date on what they think of 336 well-known people around the world. It turns out that the most popular are Bill Gates (62%), Queen Elizabeth II (61%), and Barack Obama (59%).

I thought it would be interesting just to look at the most popular political figures in the United States, so I went through the list and pulled out only American political figures. The result is shown in the chart above. Note that 5 of the 8 most popular are Democrats, and 1 is an Independent. The only Republicans in the top eight are Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice.

The charts below show the list when it is broken down by gender and generation.