As Barack Obama opens his presidential center, he does so as by far the most popular living president.
Obama is viewed positively by 57% of Americans, a new CNN poll conducted by SSRS finds, far surpassing the ratings for his two Oval Office successors. Only 34% of the public offers a favorable opinion of President Donald Trump, with former President Joe Biden’s favorability trailing at just 30%.
Obama’s standing among political independents is more than twice as high as either Biden’s or Trump’s. Unlike Biden or Trump, he also has the near-universal backing of his own party.
And though only about one-fifth of Republicans take a positive view of Obama, that’s still far above the share of Americans willing to cross party lines in support of his successors.
Other members of the presidents’ club see their ratings fall somewhere between Obama on the one side and Biden and Trump on the other. Views of George W. Bush tilt narrowly positive, 42% favorable to 33% unfavorable, while opinions of Bill Clinton are about equally split.
Views of former presidents often change retrospectively, and in many cases improve. Bush, who left the White House with deeply negative ratings, saw his image markedly improve in the following decades. And Trump, who ended his first term with just 33% of Americans rating him positively in CNN’s polling, saw his rating climb to 46% just before he was inaugurated for the second time – after which his rating promptly began another decline.
Obama, who saw mixed ratings during much of his second term, has maintained broad popularity in the years since leaving office.
By contrast, Biden — who took office with a 59% favorability rating and left it at 33% — now sees a favorability rating that’s lower than it was at any point during his presidency. The share rating him unfavorably is also down from its peak, with a growing minority instead offering no opinion.
Clinton has also seen a more unfavorable reassessment over the past decade.
The poll highlights a generational shift in Americans’ historical memory: An increasing share of the public came of age politically in the Trumpian era of politics, with little or no memory of the presidents before Obama. More than 4 in 10 adults younger than 30 say they don’t have any opinion of Bush or Clinton, respectively. (Surveys conducted over the past five years, unlike earlier polls, also gave respondents an explicit option to say they’d heard of somebody but didn’t have an opinion of them.)
Asked in an open-ended question which president they most admire, Americans largely favored relatively recent names: 30% name Obama, 19% Trump, 9% Abraham Lincoln, 9% Ronald Reagan, 6% John F. Kennedy, and 5% George Washington.
Other living presidents were named less frequently: 2% picked Clinton, and 1% each named Biden and George W. Bush. (An additional 1% named “Bush,” but didn’t specify which president.) Nearly 10% said they didn’t admire any of the presidents or offered no opinion.
Nearly two-thirds of Democrats, 64% say they most admired Obama, with 6% naming Kennedy, 5% Lincoln and 5% Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Among Republicans, Trump holds the most-admired title with a smaller 53% majority, followed by Reagan at 18%, Lincoln at 8%, and Kennedy and Washington at 5% each.
