According to a new Gallup poll released Dec. 30, Barack Obama and Donald Trump are tied as the most admired man in 2019. While it’s the 12th time for Obama to receive the honor, it’s Trump’s first – marking a surreal end to a year of chaos for the current president. Make that three years of chaos.
The 2019 polarizing results are based on data collected between Dec. 2-15 .
The open-ended Gallup poll has been running every year since 1948. Americans are prompted to name their most admired male or female “living anywhere in the world they admire most.”
According to Gallup, “relatively few Democrats choose Trump and relatively few Republicans pick Obama, while independents’ choices are divided about equally between the two men.”
The remaining male figures mentioned in the poll included former President Jimmy Carter, Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Pope Francis, Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Adam Schiff, the Dalai Lama, and Warren Buffett.
“The incumbent president has typically been Americans’ choice as the most admired man, having earned the distinction in 58 of the 72 prior Gallup polls,” Gallup author Jeffrey M. Jones wrote.
Also noteworthy: Former First Lady Michelle Obama was deemed the most admired woman for the second year in a row. She was the only woman mentioned to receive results in the double digits. Melania Trump was second in line in this year’s poll.
She is the sixth former first lady to win. Others have included Eleanor Roosevelt (1948-1950, 1952-1961), Jacqueline Kennedy (1963-1966), Mamie Eisenhower (1969-1970), Betty Ford (1978), and Hillary Clinton (2002-2017).
Additional women on the list included Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, Greta Thunberg, Queen Elizabeth II, Nancy Pelosi, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley.
View complete question responses and trends.
Survey methods: Results for this Gallup poll are based on telephone interviews conducted Dec. 2-15, 2019, with a random sample of 1,025 adults, aged 18 and older, living in all 50 U.S. states and the District of Columbia. For results based on the total sample of national adults, the margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points at the 95% confidence level. All reported margins of sampling error include computed design effects for weighting.
Each sample of national adults includes a minimum quota of 70% cellphone respondents and 30% landline respondents, with additional minimum quotas by time zone within region. Landline and cellular telephone numbers are selected using random-digit-dial methods.