Hillary Clinton was the most admired woman for the 16th consecutive year, but she barely clung to that title in 2009 when Sarah Palin nearly defeated her.
This was the second time Obama had bested a sitting President, but that hinges on a technicality, because although not President in 2008, Obama was the President-elect when the poll was conducted!
Gallup has been conducting the most-admired poll since just after WW2, and the sitting president has been the choice 58 times out of 71. Seven sitting Presidents failed to top the poll at least once: Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush and Donald Trump; but all of them won at least one other year except poor ol' Jerry Ford (and now Trump, who will have more chances).
- Bush and Trump each lost once to Obama, as noted and qualified above.
- Carter lost once to Pope John Paul II.
- Ford (twice) and Nixon (once) lost to Henry Kissinger.
- LBJ lost to an elderly Dwight Eisenhower two years in a row. Ike died the following year.
- Harry Truman lost three times, all to his bitter rival, General Douglas MacArthur.
The only time Americans have chosen a foreigner as their "most admired" was 1980, when the Polish Pope took it.
(Yeah, I know that Kissinger was born in Germany, that his real first name was Heinz, and that he speaks with a comic opera accent, but he's an American who fought against Germany in WW2. His Jewish family fled the Nazis in the 1930s; Heinz became Henry; he became a citizen in 1943; and he served as a draftee with the U.S. Army during the war. He later hung with the Rockefellers, and received all of his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Harvard. Those are some pretty toney American credentials. Looking back on his tarnished reputation, however, it's difficult to imagine that he was the most admired man in the country for three years running. I guess it's because his Presidential competition was weak: Richard Nixon in his period of disgrace, and then the inconsequential Jerry Ford. I suppose many people believed that Kissinger was the de facto President and was actually pulling the strings in the White House during the Ford years. That seems appropriate for a man whose subject of greatest scholarly expertise was Metternich.)
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ReplyDeleteSo, a MAJORITY of AMERICANS did not decide that Obama and Clinton were the 'Most Admired" people, 1,049 people did. Out of a country of 311 Million people that hardly qualifies as any kind of supportable conclusion. These polls are all like that.
ReplyDeleteAnd besides are these not the same polls that said that Donald Trump had a 3% chance of winning the Presidency in 2016? And then he came off with 62% of the Electoral College and something like 90% of the counties in the country?
Yeah, proof positive...
Just out of curiosity . . . who do you think had the bigger inauguration crowd?
DeleteDon't argue with Gent. He's a Trumpite cultist who has completely lost his ability to think critically.
DeleteGent
DeleteJust in passing, you know the polls were correct about the 2016 election, right? The average poll showed her winning by three percent, and she won by 2.1%. That's pretty damned close!
And the reason they missed is that they make no adjustment for the "other candidate" dropout rate. The polls showed 6.6% going for Johnson or Stein, but once people actually get in that booth they are reluctant to throw away their chance to contribute to the decision, so Johnson and Stein only polled 4.4% between them. The pollsters have not yet calculated a way to adjust for this factor, although in my opinion it probably could be done by an in-depth interview of the people polled.
In the 2016 election there was a strong anti-establishment sentiment, and Johnson/Stein embodied that, so it stood to reason that when their support thinned "under the gun," the majority of their defectors would go to Trump, who would clearly be the preference over Clinton among those who were voting simply to rage against the machine. After all, Clinton was a major cog in the machine they were raging against.
fwald - I don't care. It has zero impact on who is the President and is more dependent on weather than almost anything else. Justin - as opposed to certain people on here who never had the ability?
DeleteScoop, not to be obnoxious or anything but she won WHAT by 2.1%?
DeleteThe popular vote, which is what the polls predict.
DeleteKeep at it, Gent! Must be really nice to be able to bathe in a nice warm cult to keep cozy this winter!
DeleteThe popular vote does not exist, except as statistics only. I guess if that's what the polls want to use, that's their business. The Electoral College elects the President and the Constitution does not say that the People SHALL vote for the Electors. In fact, it says that the Legislatures may appoint electors in any Manner they see fit. Therefore, the Legislatures of the various states could exclude the people from voting for the Electors altogether. I'm certain that a change in how we do things to that method would not go over very well, but the Legislatures would have the LAW on their side. If the Political parties keep up their antics, it may very well come to that. Time will tell.
DeleteWhatever, Joe, whatever. Call it whatever makes you feel good, but I have the facts on my side. What do you have?
DeleteYou're not paying attention, or you're watching to much Fox News. Your original point was that the polls were not accurate. That point was incorrect. The polls were VERY accurate. They predicted that Hillary would win the popular vote by 3% and she won by 2.1 - well within the margin of error expected from fairly small sampling sizes.
DeleteWhat a well-designed scientific poll can do is to take a sample and extrapolate that sample to a population. They took a sample of the US population and extrapolated it to the entire USA, and did so very authoritatively. Every single major polling organization which polled likely voters called the race well within their margin of error except IBD/TIPP, which missed by 4.1 with an MOE of 3.1.
No major scientific pollsters offered any overview of the electoral college, although various media pundits attempted to do so. But the failure of some TV windbags to predict the Electoral College cannot be blamed on the scientists who were spot-on in their estimate of the popular vote.
And that happened despite the fact that a third of the supposed Johnson/Stein voters bailed out for a major party candidate when push came to shove, which was not possible to predict from the limited data collected.
Remember that the "most admired man" poll is not based on the faulty weighting of the Senate, which carries through to the Electoral College, but on the actual opinions of the majority of the people. Those are the same people who, in the majority, felt that Hillary should be President and felt that Obama should be President, so it is not surprising that they are more admired than the guy who got fewer popular votes.
Obama got 69 million votes, then 66 million
Hillary got 66 million
So you don't really need Gallup to tell you that they are more admired than the guy who got 63 million. The entire population has already addressed that subject.
(But the Gallup organization is obviously right, since their poll says the same thing the voters have already said in authoritative numbers. Remember, the job of polling is to predict the population from the sample, and we have a case here where the sample and the population are in obvious agreement.)
Ok, so Obama's a popular guy. And the polls were accurate in predicting individual votes. I'll give you that. But predicting who would get more 'popular' votes is irrelevant since they do not count in our current system, where all but 6 states award their EC votes as winner takes all. That might change if the laws regarding votes were to ever be changed.
DeleteI do not know Obama personally so I cannot say whether I would like him or not but I do know he was a lousy President - IMHO.
But as for the 'popular vote', Hillary got a few more votes than Trump. Doesn't mean a thing because those extra votes were not in the right states to give her the EC majority she needed to win. Her campaign promoted the idea of 'jumping ship' to the Trump voters, a strategy that failed badly for her. He lost two voters to her, she lost 8 to him.
The last ABC Poll I saw the day before the election stated that it was the opinion of that poll that Trump had a 3% chance of winning the election, not the 'popular vote', the election, a prediction that was not only incorrect, but badly incorrect, as it turns out.
It just proves there is only one poll that counts and that is the one on election day when "We, the People" choose the voters who will elect the President.
I guess what I am trying to say - poll or no poll, right, wrong or indifferent - is that when people state as a fact that Hillary actually won the election, they are wrong. She did not get a majority of the votes in the EC.
And, despite all the shouting, this country NEEDS the EC, otherwise, the large population states (CA, TX, FL, NY) would control who is President - every time. The other 46 or 47 states might as well not vote at all.
That's not accurate. The large population states would control absolutely nothing. The election would be controlled by who got the most votes. A vote in California would count EXACTLY as much as a vote in Wyoming. Right now, a vote in California counts for much less, since it gets only 55 electoral votes for more than 14 million voters, while Wyoming gets 3 electoral votes for only 255,000 voters. If the Electoral votes were proportionate to population, based on three for Wyoming, California would get 168 Electoral votes! I don't so much object to the concept of an Electoral College, as to the fact that it allows people in the sparsely populated states to cast more votes than they should. I would not object very strongly at all if the number of electoral votes for each state was based on the number of Representatives, as opposed to the number of Senators plus Representatives. It's the composition of the Senate that throws the proportions off. Imagine this: if a nuclear accident made Alaska unlivable like Chernobyl, and there were only three scientists living there, two of them would also be US Senators and one would be in the House, because "every state shall have two Senators and at least one Representative."
DeleteThose three guys would get three electoral votes!
Wyoming is not quite that absurd, but it's plenty silly enough. If you live there and get at least Cs in school, chances are pretty good that you'll be in Congress sooner or later.
I'm not arguing. I'm just asking him a question.
ReplyDeleteGent - seriously, who had the bigger inauguration crowd? I know it doesn't matter, just curious what your opinion is.
ReplyDeleteIt would depend a lot on what time your photo was taken. The Democrats tried to tell us that Trump's attendance was practically nil, and supposedly proved it with a photograph showing the Mall almost empty, as compared to a photo of Obama's first inaugural, showing a huge crowd. That is until, the National Park Service confirmed that the Trump photo was taken at just after 6 am, when you would expect the place to be nearly empty - 6 hours before the event, and the Obama photo was taken just before noon.
DeleteAs for myself, I will believe what the National Park Service and the Secret Service stated: that the two inaugurations were pretty much equally attended.
Again, many of your statements are simply not accurate. You'll have a hard time believing what those two organizations said, given that they said nothing. Neither the National Park Service nor the Secret Service make estimates of crowd size in the National Mall. The Secret Service never did. The National Park Service was actually banned by law from making crowd estimates after the 1995 brouhaha surrounding the Million Man March, a number which they controversially, but accurately, debunked. (It was actually about 460.000)
DeleteThere were, however, many ways to compare the crowds. The various estimates for Trump's inauguration varied, but the very high end was 900,000 (many other estimates were far lower), compared to Obama's first one in 2009, which was generally estimated at 1,800,000. Obama's second one, lacking the same sense of history, drew about half as many as the first, give or take.
However, Trump's crowd may have been the largest ever to see a Republican inaugurated. Based on the number of riders on the DC Metro, Trump and Bush 2005 were VERY close.
Riders all day of inauguration: Trump 571,000, Bush 584,000.
Riders before 11 AM: Trump 193,000, Bush 197,000.
Obama's 2009 numbers were vastly higher: 1,100,000 for the entire day, 513,000 before 11 AM.
(Obama's second inauguration also drew more riders than Trump's, as well as slightly larger estimated crowds.)
(And the Women's March on the day after Trump's inauguration drew much bigger crowds and many more riders on the Metro. It probably drew twice as many people as the inauguration itself.)
No matter the method you use to make the estimation, Trump's 2013 crowd was somewhere between a third and a half as many as Obama's 2009 crowd.
By the way, that 6 AM story is urban myth (or. more accurately stated, an outright lie). The famous comparison picture was taken by a Reuters photographer at exactly 12:01:18. Reuters' editor reported: "Only one news organization had a still photographer atop the Washington Monument for the inauguration and I assigned him to be there. This photo by Reuters News Pictures staff photographer Lucas Jackson was taken at 12:01:18 p.m. on Friday and not much earlier as many people are trying to claim."
The comparable Reuters photo from 2009 was taken at approximately the same time.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-media/white-house-accuses-media-of-playing-down-inauguration-crowds-idUSKBN15600I
Ok, so I stopped listening to the debate about inauguration crowd size after I saw a picture on one of the news sites (I forget now which one) that showed a time stamp of 06:05 01-20-17. I suppose that type of image could be faked as well as any other but what I really do not understand is why the Obama supporters have this emotional need to prove that Obama is better than Trump. Trump did not run against Obama, he ran against Hillary.
DeleteWill Obama be the Most Admired man in America for the next ten years? I hope so! Because I just remembered I have some mint condition Obama Campaign stuff I want to sell and I hope to get top dollar for them.
IMHO, Hillary could not have been half the President that Trump is, so far. Hell, she probably would have sold the country to the highest bidder by now! As for Obama vs Trump, quality-wise... no question. Trump has outperformed Obama in every important category AND is in the process of returning America to the right track and to We, the People.
And it's about time.
Okay, so you don't care if Obama had a much larger crowd. But are you admitting that he did?
Delete