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John Kerry least popular person in the U.S.
mcc
glitchRegistered User, ClubPA regular
glitchRegistered User, ClubPA regular
Quinnipiac university has just released a poll conducted shortly after the elections in which they attempt to measure the 'likability' of various political figures. Apparently John Kerry is now the only person in the U.S. even less popular than George W. Bush. Well, okay, that's not true. There are apparently five people in the United States less popular than George W. Bush. And among these, John Kerry is in dead last.
There's a bunch of news stories floating around that just regurgitate little snippets of this poll, but let's just go ahead and look at the whole thing:
George W. Bush's personal "likability" ratings are a good ten points higher than his most recent polled job approval ratings.
On the 2008 presidential candidates front, Barack Obama did very well, but an enormous number of people, a full 41 percent, said they didn't know enough about him to make a judgement one way or the other. Mitt Romney fared even worse-- not only did he not score well, but a full 64 percent didn't know enough about him to tell whether they liked him, which scores him worse in the name recognition test than anyone on the list except Evan Bayh and "N.M. Gov. Bill Richardson" (who?). Rudolph Giuliani, meanwhile, not only topped the likability list by a large margin, but nearly everybody has heard of him.
Joe Lieberman, whether the internet hates him or not, got a 52% likability rating, polling higher than any non-retired Democrat except Barack Obama.
At the bottom of the link above, they give comparison shots showing how this same poll has turned out over time-- apparently they've done this same "likability" poll four times this year, and they have the numbers for each. Looking at this, we find:
Russ Feingold was polling quite well in March, getting about 49% likability, but then fell in successive polls and wasn't even included on this poll at all;
We find Nancy Pelosi's likability rating jumped enormously between early September and late November;
and we find that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, though they were not included on the two most recent polls, if we pretend their numbers are the same as they were in June (unlikely; Rumsfeld at least would probably score even lower at this point), they would very nearly get last place, with Cheney slipping in between John Kerry and Harry Reid and Rumsfeld slipping in between Harry Reid and Bill Frist.
There's a bunch of news stories floating around that just regurgitate little snippets of this poll, but let's just go ahead and look at the whole thing:
Some small things maybe to notice about this poll:Ranking) Politician - Percentage of americans who "like" that politician (Percentage of Americans who said they don't know enough about the person to tell)
1) Rudolph Giuliani - 64.2. (9) [MOST POPULAR]
2) Sen. Barack Obama 58.8 (41)
3) Sen. John McCain 57.7 (12)
4) Condoleezza Rice - 56.1 (7)
5) Bill Clinton - 55.8 (1)
6) Sen. Joseph Lieberman - 52.7 (16)
7) NYC Mayor Michael Bloomberg - 51.1 (44)
8) John Edwards - 49.9 (20)
9) Sen. Hillary Clinton - 49 (1)
10) N.M. Gov. Bill Richardson - 47.7 (65)
11) Sen. Joseph Biden 47 (52)
12) Nancy Pelosi 46.9 (34)
13) Gov. Mitt Romney - 45.9 (64)
14) Former VP Al Gore - 44.9 (3)
15) President George Bush - 43.8 (1)
16) Sen. Evan Bayh - 43.3 (75)
17) Newt Gingrich - 42 (15)
18) Sen. Bill Frist - 41.5 (53)
19) Sen. Harry Reid - 41.2 (61)
20) Sen. John Kerry - 39.6 (5) [LEAST POPULAR]
George W. Bush's personal "likability" ratings are a good ten points higher than his most recent polled job approval ratings.
On the 2008 presidential candidates front, Barack Obama did very well, but an enormous number of people, a full 41 percent, said they didn't know enough about him to make a judgement one way or the other. Mitt Romney fared even worse-- not only did he not score well, but a full 64 percent didn't know enough about him to tell whether they liked him, which scores him worse in the name recognition test than anyone on the list except Evan Bayh and "N.M. Gov. Bill Richardson" (who?). Rudolph Giuliani, meanwhile, not only topped the likability list by a large margin, but nearly everybody has heard of him.
Joe Lieberman, whether the internet hates him or not, got a 52% likability rating, polling higher than any non-retired Democrat except Barack Obama.
At the bottom of the link above, they give comparison shots showing how this same poll has turned out over time-- apparently they've done this same "likability" poll four times this year, and they have the numbers for each. Looking at this, we find:
Russ Feingold was polling quite well in March, getting about 49% likability, but then fell in successive polls and wasn't even included on this poll at all;
We find Nancy Pelosi's likability rating jumped enormously between early September and late November;
and we find that Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, though they were not included on the two most recent polls, if we pretend their numbers are the same as they were in June (unlikely; Rumsfeld at least would probably score even lower at this point), they would very nearly get last place, with Cheney slipping in between John Kerry and Harry Reid and Rumsfeld slipping in between Harry Reid and Bill Frist.
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it means that this poll is nearly worthless, though this thread could be interesting.
Seems like a rather vague and useless term to me.
edit: dammit, MC.
John Kerry is at the bottom of 20 people.
That means he's the least liked out of all the millions of Americans!
We're electing them based on their ability to smile all purty for the tv cameras
I'm pretty sure -I- would rank lower.
Kerry's a moron, but he's not exactly an evil hateful prick.
I mean, how many people even know who Bill Richardson is, much less what kind of person he is?
Wait, that's not good either.
According to the poll, thirty-five percent do.
Or said they did, I wonder if this poll is lie proof?
Nixon won that debate, God damn it.
I guess, but who's going to go to the bother of lying about whether they've heard of "N.M. Gov Bill Richardson"?
You'd think they'd save up the lies for more important things, like "do you pee in the shower" or "where did you hide the bodies?"
See, I don't know about this. Insecure people tend to lie to look smarter than they actually are. "Do you know so and so?" I mean, holding up a picture and asking people to write down who they are would be a very easy way to keep this from happening, but I wonder if they even thought that far ahead.
Heh, DC is the Hollywood for ugly people.
Edit: Except for the part about Kerry being least popular HAHA.
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The sad thing about the emergence of the internet is that far too few people go out and research the candidates, and they have to wade through thousands of pages of crap to do so in the first place.. And you can never be 100% sure if what you are reading is real.
I've known since I was 17 that politics was a popularity contest. If it wasn't, we wouldn't see so many hate and attack ads.
The only use for this poll that I can see is to look at trends in "likability" over time. For example, Kerry's rating has gone from 46.3% to 39.6% since March. This represents a fairly significant drop, even taking the margin of error into account. But, overall, these ratings seem to remain fairly steady over time (at least over the March-November span mentioned on the page).
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I mean, if you want to claim scientific polling is in one way or another garbage, you'll probably be able to make a fairly convincing case of such, but as far as I see this one isn't any worse or better than any other.
The "give a number between 0 and 100" is, afaik, nonstandard. I guess it might make sense when viewed as a relative measure.
edit: giving the mean really ends up hiding the distribution. There's no way of knowing if, say, John McCain is generall slightly well-regarded, while Hillary Clinton is either adored or despised but nothing in the middle.
And this is extremely relevant. For the purposes of politics, it's generally better to have everyone think you're kind of okay than to have 55% of the nation love you and 45% of the nation hoping you wind up in the middle of the road one day so they can make the decision to not swerve. When a good number of people loathe you, they're going to go to great lengths to fuck up your chances of getting elected. Which is why Hillary is such a poor choice. Most people at least kinda like her, but those that don't want her to die in a fire.
2f. How do you feel about Hillary Clinton? Wht Wht Wht Evangl/BrnAgn Tot Men Wom Prot Cath Christians 0-20 32% 36% 28% 41% 33% 46% 21-40 9 11 8 10 10 12 41-60 15 17 14 17 17 15 61-80 21 21 21 19 22 16 81-100 20 14 27 11 18 10 DK 1 1 1 1 1 2 RF - - - - - - <50 43% 49% 37% 54% 43% 60% 50 7 7 7 7 8 7 >50 48 42 54 37 48 32 Mean 49.0 44.2 53.7 39.9 47.9 36.3 Rep Dem Ind Red Blue Purple 0-20 67% 7% 25% 35% 29% 32% 21-40 13 5 10 10 9 9 41-60 8 16 22 14 16 16 61-80 7 32 24 19 22 23 81-100 3 40 18 20 23 18 DK 2 1 - 1 1 2 RF - - - - - - <50 80% 12% 39% 48% 39% 42% 50 4 10 8 6 7 9 >50 13 77 53 46 53 47 Mean 20.5 72.6 51.5 46.7 51.9 48.6You can probably then think of those 20-percent categories as equivalent to "dislike strongly / dislike / like strongly / ..." or whatever, which is a bit more standard than asking to rate on a number scale.
Bush has done pretty well with this bipolar distribution. Especially once elected, he's spent six years doing whatever the hell he wanted and not having to make any concessions to anyone. It was really only the absolute depths of incompetance that have landed him in hot water, and even now wer have a lot of people who reluctantly oppose him.
There are political strengths to different distributions, I guess is what I'm trying to say. A polarizing candidate can be very effective, though he needs to run a much different kind of campaign than a "yay for everyone" candidate.
I guess what I'm getting at is that the polarizing strategy can work really well, but not in the long term-- and I think that after Bush, a lot of middle-of-the-road voters are going to be actively turned off by anyone (of either party) who tries to take the polarization route for a few years, because they're tired of it. I still think that a lot of why Bush did so well in 2000 is that after the messy end of the Clinton presidency, America just really wanted to vote for someone who didn't seem like a lawyer. I can't help but suspect we're going to see a similar backlash against some of the things that Bush has been in 2008, though I admittedly can't figure out yet which ones.
Isn't Hillary pretty much diametrically opposed to Bush? For starters, she's an intelligent, educated, leftist woman who can construct a sentence. If the anti-Bush backlash is strong enough, doesn't that mean that she stands a chance? She's THE anti-Bush without having to make anti-Bushness her political platform.
I also think there's a difference between a newbie and an incumbent. Nobody really hated Bush before he got into office. Once he was in office, he had the experience/stay-the-course thing working to his advantage.