Dolly Parton tops US favorability poll at 70%, beats Obama by 50+ points
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- Dolly Parton topped the UMass/YouGov poll with 70% favorability, 5% unfavorability, and a net +65 — more than 50 points ahead of Barack Obama (+14) and Volodymyr Zelenskyy (+12), the only other figures with double-digit net favorability.
- Vladimir Putin landed at the exact inverse of Parton with a -65 net favorability, mirroring her score in negative and placing him at the bottom of the 20-plus figure list.
- Among the US presidents polled, George W. Bush was the only one with a positive net score (+5), while Donald Trump (-18) and Joe Biden (-19) both finished underwater; Taylor Swift scored +3.
- Only Parton and Obama earned favorable opinions from at least half of the 1,000 respondents surveyed heading into April.
- Parton attributed her cross-partisan appeal to a deliberately apolitical public posture, telling the Hill in 2017: "I've got as many Republican fans as Democrats, and I don't want to make any of them mad at me, so I don't play politics."
- Parton's Dollywood Foundation Imagination Library has donated more than 270 million books to children under five across the US, Canada, the UK, Ireland, and Australia, and she gave $1 million to Vanderbilt University Medical Center that aided the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine effort.
Why it matters: The poll's spread is the story: Parton's +65 and Putin's -65 bookend a 130-point gap that maps cleanly onto cultural goodwill versus geopolitical friction. Parton's combination of apolitical positioning and visible philanthropy — 270 million free books, $1 million toward Moderna's COVID vaccine, $12 million to 2016 wildfire survivors — produced favorability that beat every sitting or former US president surveyed, including the one she shared a Tennessee home state with.
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