When former Republican senator and presidential candidate Bob Dole died last month, the Gallup organization revisited Dole’s career standing in its polls over the years.
Midway through the article, Gallup notes that Dole, despite his long career in politics and his upstanding reputation as a World War II hero and a politician, could claim only one top-10 finish in the firm’s annual “most admired” poll. That came in 1995 when Dole tied former Democratic President Jimmy Carter for 10th place.
What makes that newsworthy is that Dole reference is the only recent mention of Gallup’s “most admired” survey on its website.
In other words, it appears that Gallup did not conduct the poll in 2021 – which, if it is the case, would be only the second time since 1946 that Gallup did not do such a report.
Earlier this week, columnist Brad Wilmouth, of the conservative media watchdog Newsbusters, offered a theory.
Gallup passed on the poll to avoid naming Donald Trump America’s “most admired man” for a second consecutive year.
If Wilmouth is right, at least Gallup was fair to both sexes. It also did not do a “most admired woman” poll.
As The Free Press reported a little over a year ago, Trump took top honors in the 2020 Gallup survey, along with Michelle Obama as the nation’s most admired woman.
The selection of Trump ended former President Barack Obama’s 12-year reign after Trump had tied Obama in 2019.
As Gallup explained in December 2020, “When the sitting president is not the top choice, it is usually because he is unpopular politically.”
Wilmouth noted that he searched Google to see if Gallup’s yearly report and came up with goose eggs.
At least in the last four polls, according to Gallup’s website, the poll results were released on Dec. 30 or a few days earlier.
Wilmouth suggested the lack of a poll may have been by design.
The “liberal news media lost interest in the annual poll after Donald Trump started edging out Barack Obama for first place, whereas the networks previously enjoyed using the survey to embarrassing Trump as sitting President failing to come in first place.”
“This year, a Google search conspicuously shows no sign that Gallup conducted such a poll for the past year, possibly because they couldn’t stand that thought having to report what likely would have been Trump coming in first again this year — after the January 6 riot.”
Wilmouth pointed out that when Obama took the title in 2018, the outcome was blared on “Good Morning America,” “CBS This Morning,” the “CBS Evening News,” the “NBC Nightly News,” CNN’s “New Day,” as well as “CNN Tonight” with Don Lemon and “Anderson Cooper 360.”
In 2020, all of those shows ignored it. The only mention of Trump’s win came on Fox News.
“It says something that one of the most prominent polling firms cited by the dominant media is so biased that they would choose not to do a poll, and break a 74-year tradition, if they expect not to approve of the results politically,” Wilmouth wrote.
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