Putin now among most hated world figures in recent U.S. history
Times have certainly changed.
That’s down from a 75-to-13 split last week in another poll. And both polls show negative views of Putin are exceedingly bipartisan now.
Those numbers put Putin in some rarefied company when it comes to the most hated world leaders in recent American history.
We looked back through the Roper Center’s polling archive to see how Putin’s new numbers compared to some of the most nefarious leaders in the recent past. The upshot: Putin is now in the territory of Osama bin Laden, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong Un, Fidel Castro and Iranian Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. He’s not quite as hated as the first two at their most-hated, but he’s awfully close.
There is, admittedly, relatively little polling on some of these leaders — though when there was, it was generally when they were at their most notorious, for obvious reasons. Our data also unfortunately exclude some figures we’d love to include, such as Adolf Hitler, Joseph Stalin, Benito Mussolini and Pol Pot. Alas, the fewer pollsters we had in their times didn’t ask this question about them.
In some cases, like with Ugandan dictator Idi Amin, polls did ask what people thought of them, but not in a straight favorable/unfavorable way that allows for a direct comparison. (Amin seems to have been modestly more popular than Putin is today shortly before his death in 1979, for what it’s worth.)
And perhaps most interestingly, Putin is now significantly more unpopular than Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev was in 1982. (Brezhnev presided over the most intense periods of the Cold War, and the poll available came a few years after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. But Brezhnev had largely faded from public view by then and died that year.)
And the degree is rather significant in a way that suggests past and recent attempts by certain former presidents and prominent figures to inject nuance into views of Putin have now completely fallen victim to the reality of the war in Ukraine.
