Presidential favorites

July 4, 2007

Rasmussen Reports conducted a poll gauging Americans’ attitudes towards every U.S. president in history. There weren’t too many surprises.

Six American Presidents are viewed favorably by at least 80% of all Americans. Those esteemed six are led by the first President George Washington. The Father of our Country is viewed favorably by 94% of Americans. The sixteenth President, Abraham Lincoln, is the second most popular. The man who gave us the Gettysburg Address is viewed favorably by 92%.

The next four are Thomas Jefferson (89%), Teddy Roosevelt (84%), Franklin D. Roosevelt (81%), and John F. Kennedy (80%).

And who fared the worst? No big surprises there, either.

The highest unfavorable rating for any President is earned by Richard Nixon. Sixty percent (60%) of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the only President to resign from office. Thirty-two percent (32%) have a favorable opinion of the man who famously went to China.

Close on Nixon’s heels for most unpopular is the current President, George W. Bush. Fifty-nine percent (59%) have an unfavorable opinion of him.

It’s probably worth clarifying that the favorable/unfavorable rating was a combined score — Rasmussen gave respondents a choice between “very favorable, “somewhat favorable,” “somewhat unfavorable,” and “very unfavorable.” Nixon’s “very unfavorable” was 25%. George W. Bush’s was 40%.

I had two random questions, though. First, the only president who came close to George W. Bush for “very unfavorable” was William McKinley, who also got a 40%. Was this some kind of printing error? Does McKinley really have that many critics?

And second, who are the 6% of Americans who are reluctant to give George Washington the thumbs up? Is there some kind of anti-Washington contingent out there that’s gone largely unnoticed?

who are the 6% of Americans who are reluctant to give George Washington the thumbs up?

My field agents report that these are the guys who think George Washington is hiding Saddam’s WMDs for him. (In his monument, if you must know)

  • And second, who are the 6% of Americans who are reluctant to give George Washington the thumbs up? Is there some kind of anti-Washington contingent out there that’s gone largely unnoticed?

    They probably thought that “George” meant Bush41. Let’s make this one Bush43 minus one (year in office).

  • 28% have a favorable opinion of James Buchanan, which means Bush is now tied with the man who let the country slide into the Civil War.

  • The 40% Very Unfavorable for McKinley must be a misprint. The total Unfavorable fgure is only 24% and the Somewhat Unfavorable is 20%, so the Very Unfavorable probably should be 4%. By the way, it’s also pretty interesting that for all the crap certain elements dump on Jimmy Carter for being such a rotten President, he still manages to get a 57% favorability rating.

  • It’s probably also worth mentioning that Nixon and Bush weren’t in anything like the same league when it came to INFLUENCING public opinion of the president. There’s no need to revisit the wince-inducing “Mission Accomplished” moment, but what about the sound-and-lights extravaganza that often accompanied Bush’s public appearances, the request to men in the front row who would share the camera angle to remove their ties and roll up their sleeves, to create a more blue-collar impression – the faked letters from troops to small-town family back home about the warmth of the Iraqi welcome, the coached troops in the field who were prepped to lob the president softball questions he could easily swat down, or which otherwise served his talking points….. I could go on, but why?

    Americans seem to have long memories where Nixon is concerned, but I’m betting that won’t be true of Bush. Nixon, viewed through the glass of time, seems to have been such a petty criminal compared with Bush, and to really have hurt few but himself. It should also be noted that most of the world did not view Americans as a group as sharing in Nixon’s deficiencies, as well.

    I think that after Bush is gone, the country will be so focused on setting to rights the wreckage he caused that those years will seem like a bad dream – that is, unless he manages to get the country involved in an even bigger war in the Middle East before he departs. A few loonies will remember him as a great leader, bit after a little while, few will want to remember him at all.

  • Hey Steve, are you the only warm body around TPM available to post Election Central announcements? 🙂

  • the 6% of Americans who are reluctant to give George Washington the thumbs up?

    Probably hard-core feminists who don’t like a monumental male icon, or minorities who have a grudge against white people (the white founding father image).

    What I don’t get is the 92% for Lincoln. So 8% of the people who were polled are racists, willing to admit it, and know their facts (that Lincoln fought the South / freed the slaves)? I would have thought it would have been a little higher. But when people answer polls, you’re not getting an explanation to questions like this- the favorable answer for some people could just mean “do I think he’s smart or capable” or “what do I want people to think of me if anyone reads this”- remember, the majority of Americans are very ignorant (as proved by a variety of polls) and many may not even understand polls (why they’re being taken, how they’re going to be used, who’s likely paying for them).

  • Ditto on the McKinley thing, Steve. What I recall of him from my history is that he was more of a Progressive / trust-busting era guy, opposed by a lot of left-radicals. So that’s funny and ironic that today with all the Faux News and everything that McKinley gets such a high disapproval relative to everyone else, ha

  • the 6% of Americans who are reluctant to give George Washington the thumbs up?

    Probably also commies who just want to hate anybody that everyone else likes (“he was rich, he was a snob, blah blah blah”- okay, we all have to admit they know their history, at least…). And Washington owned slaves. What if you’re a black person who hears a question like that and thinks, “I don’t want to say ‘favorable’ about anyone that I know owned slaves.” Actually, there are a lot of reasons not to like Washington.

    Re: the McKinley thing, probably a lot of people were told a lot about how corrupt he was by their high school history teachers, and the association of his name w/ the incredible stories of corruption sticks with them.

  • McKinley was a conservative in the era BEFORE the Progressive/trust-busting era. He was in fact the total embodiment of the Gilded Age Republicans, completely in thrall to his advisor, Senator Mark Hanna. There’s a reason why McKinley is Karl Rove’s favorite President, since Rove sees himself as the modern-day embodiment of Hanna, who was the ultimate insider wheeler-dealer. It should be remembered that McKinley presided over the last successful Republican War, the Spanish-American War – the second American war that was overtly imperialist, with the purpose of taking property from the other side in a way that was qualitatively different from the first American imperialist war, the Mexican War, since the objective was to rule the conquered territory as colonies in the same way Britain and France were doing at the time. When you think about it, the Spanish-American War was the most thoroughly Republican war ever, embodying all the great Republican principles: jingoist nationalism, muscular militarism, choosing a weak enemy (Mexico on the other hand was seen as almost an equal of the 1840s America, though it turned out not to be the case), racism, triumphalism, a desire to jail dissidents (who included Andrew Carnegie and Mark Twain, among many others).

    And even with all that triumph in the war, McKinley (read Hanna) felt a need to have a for-real “hero” in the race, hence their bringing-along of Theodore Roosevelt, who they planned to sideline and minimalize in the Vice Presidency.

    Actually, McKinley’s career shows the real value of assassination as a political tool.

  • 6% of people are immature and like to screw with polls. This poll, in any case.

  • So, Georgie-Porgie compares the war in Iraq to the American Revolution today. He’s got that right – with the Iraqis as the American Revolutionaries and Georgie’s Imperial Wehrmacht as the British.

  • 6% of people are immature and like to screw with polls. This poll, in any case.

    You can’t possibly think that everyone they asked viewed George Washington favorably.

  • Washington did own quite a few slaves (and remember recently, the quarters for his slaves was discovered in Philadelphia). According to this he was an adulterer. And he like all the presidents except the short-lived Harrison had scandals occur while he was president (there’s a book out, called “Presidential Scandals”). So it’s not surprising that some people disapprove of him.

  • Oh, a closer look at the results shows that of that 6%, 4% aren’t sure with the remaining 2% having a “somewhat unfavorable” view of him.

    And why is Reagan so popular anyway?

  • Hey Steve, are you the only warm body around TPM available to post Election Central announcements?

    What gave it away?

  • Since conservative p.o.v.’s often aren’t well-represented on this blog, I decided to add the following list:

    *A Conservative’s List of American Presidents*

    Smartest President:
    George W. Bush

    Most Likely To Succeed:
    Richard M. Nixon

    Best-looking President:
    George Washington

    Best Military Commander:
    George Washington

    Best President Over-all:
    George Washington

    Most Unattractive President:
    John F. Kennedy (too ethnic)

  • Nice photo essay of Teddy here.

    Favorite quote from the above site:

    Working shoulder to shoulder with all kinds of men in the west he said, “took the snob” out of him.

    What a difference from today’s President eh?

    Teddy’s daddy got him a home gym… not out of Vietnam.
    And while I am not enamored with the hunting… at least the animals weren’t caged just before hand…
    We can thank Teddy for the oldest National Park.
    What can we thank Bush for?
    Absolutely nothing.

    Iron men and wooden ships versus wooden men and iron ships.
    How sad…

  • thank you, tom cleaver, for saving me the trouble of working through my intoxication to type the same post. well said.

  • My sister just saw SiCKO and said it is amazing, told me I have to go to a movie theatre and see it right now. She says it seems like it would really get people to do something.

  • Here’s something to think about when viewing these kinds of poll results: a couple years ago, Bush would have ranked up there near Washington and Lincoln. Just sayin…

  • The same 6% as among Muslims in the U.S. who said they favor the terrorists?

    Actually, I think it’s very encouraging that so many favor Lincoln, who I believe used to be disliked in the South, and Kennedy, who used to be disliked by Republicans even more recently.

  • I used to rate James Buchanan and W.G. Harding as the pits in US Presidents. However, like any good Olympic figure skating judge, I gave neither an absolute zero in case someone outperformed them. W has proved my tactic right.

    (I’m surprised that St. Ronnie wasn’t ranked first. After all, there’s an airport and Federal buildings named for him…. )

  • Re: infoshaman @ #26
    (I’m surprised that St. Ronnie wasn’t ranked first. After all, there’s an airport and Federal buildings named for him…. )

    There’s also a lovely tollway here in Illinois named Reagan Memorial Tollway (I-88). How apropos that it’s a tollway and that it’s full of potholes. Not coincidentally, I-88 runs through Dinny Hastert’s district.

  • Steve,

    I did find it a little amusing that while you listed all five of the popular presidents, you stopped short of Nixon and President Bush. Could it be because good ol’ Bubba was on that list as well?

    Look, I’m a Bill Clinton fan. I enjoyed his presidency, despite its lapses in personal judgement — but I also concede that a great deal of people didn’t care for him. I don’t like the fact he’s on the unpopular list, but hey what can you do.

    I think the least you should have done was posted the entire unpopular list in your blog. At the very least you could have said “Bill Clinton’s in the list too…though I don’t agree with it”

    We have enough trouble with the Conservative Bloggers ommitting certain points and facts in their posts to suit their needs — please don’t fall into their trappings.

  • “What I don’t get is the 92% for Lincoln. So 8% of the people who were polled are racists, willing to admit it, and know their facts (that Lincoln fought the South / freed the slaves)?”

    As an Illinoisan, I was raised with a kind of cultish devotion toward our 16th president. Instead of biographies, what we read were hagiographies, and I still think of Lincoln sometimes as America’s sainted president. Since childhood, I’ve learned things about his presidency, though, that are definitely not flattering. He did not fight the Civil War to free the slaves but to preserve some quasi-mystical Union that relatively few of his peers even understood. The issue of secession was never resolved legally but at gunpoint, which isn’t that admirable, IMHO. He did not “free the slaves” with his Emancipation Proclamation, which only affected the states that were in rebellion and was issued mainly as a PR stunt to impress European powers as to the US having moral high ground in the war. And some historians argue that Lincoln, with his drive to preserve the Union and his use of tactics like suspending habeas corpus, is in a sense responsible for the unchecked federal powers that currently plague this nation. (I’m thinking of things like the DEA raiding legal cannabis clinics in California.)

    So there are lots of reasons why someone wouldn’t have the most favorable opinion of Lincoln that don’t necessarily have to do with racism or “Southern ignorance.”

  • FYI, the 40% Unfavorable for McKinley was definitely an error, it has now been changed to 4%.

  • I’m not really sure why Mckinley would be rated so low. He has some spots on his record like the Spanish American war and getting killed in office. But what about Andrew Johnson? Considered one of the most ineffective Presidents ever. Almost impeached and considered a partisan hack. Or how about president Grant who let criminals run the government while he was busy getting drunk. Or Harding with the Teapot dome scandal? As for Washington… When he was a young man he made his fortune being a surveyor. He either made big mistakes or he falsified the records and then bought the properties for much less than they were really worth. So much for Honest George. Bush… Clearly the worst president EVER!

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