Most Admired? How About a Friend or Relative

At the end of last year, Gallup conducted a poll of who were the most admired men and women in America.  The widely reported results showed that Barack Obama was the most admired man, and Hillary Clinton the most admired woman.

The actual question that was asked was this: "What man (or woman) have you heard or read about, living today, in any part of the world, do you admire the most?"

But in digging into the details of the report (found at a link on the bottom of their summary), there was some interesting data:

• Numbers reflected names that folks admired most, plus a second choice.
• While Obama was indeed the highest mentioned, he was only mentioned by 16% of the respondents 
• The 16% Obama earned was down 14 percentage points - nearly half - from last year's poll.
• Akin to Obama's numbers, Hillary Clinton, the "most admired woman" was mentioned on only 15% of the respondents.
• Clinton suffered degradation of her poll numbers as well, as she was first last year, but with 21% of the respondents

But the really interesting data point is that the second most admired person listed, for both men and women, is Friend/Relative. For men, it was listed 9% of the time, and for women it was listed 13% of the time.  Not only that, but the number has grown from when Gallup started taking this poll back in 2003.  Back then, Friend/Relative was 4% for men and 9% for women.

The takeaways appear obvious:

• With their various scandals the past year, it ground into Obama and Hillary's admiration rating.  Not surprising.
• People are starting to admire more folks that they know personally.  

Both are probably a very good thing.