John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan are the most popular recent presidents, according to a poll conducted by the University of Virginia Center for Politics and Reuters/Ipsos.
In the survey released Thursday, American adults ranked the presidents that served from 1950 to 2000 — Dwight Eisenhower through Bill Clinton.
Kennedy and Reagan were rated as the best presidents during that time period.
The results:
- John F. Kennedy: 53 percent.
- Ronald Reagan: 43 percent.
- Bill Clinton: 28 percent.
- Dwight Eisenhower: 13 percent.
- George H.W. Bush: 13 percent.
- Jimmy Carter 10 percent.
- Lyndon Johnson: 4 percent.
- Richard Nixon: 3 percent.
- Gerald Ford: 2 percent.
Voters were asked which former president they would bring back to the Oval Office if they could. The results:
- Reagan: 23 percent.
- Kennedy: 22 percent.
- Barack Obama: 21 percent.
- Abraham Lincoln: 12 percent.
- Franklin Roosevelt: 7 percent.
- Bill Clinton: 6 percent.
When asked to rank all former presidents from 1 to 10, voters gave Kennedy and Reagan double-digit scores.
- Kennedy: 24 percent.
- Reagan: 20 percent.
JFK and Reagan also topped the poll's mean score that averaged all the ratings voters gave to each president:
- Kennedy: 7.4.
- Reagan: 6.5.
- Eisenhower: 6.3.
- Clinton: 5.3.
- Ford: 5.
- Bush: 5.
- Carter: 5.
- Johnson: 4.8.
- Nixon: 3.5.
Bill Clinton experienced a sharp drop in popularity since the University of Virginia Center of Politics poll in 2012. In the current poll, 28 percent of voters rated Clinton as the best former president, while back in 2012, Clinton's number was equal to Reagan's at 46 percent.
The poll was conducted May 11 to May 15 with a sample of roughly 1,472 adults ages 18 and up from all 50 states, according to the poll report.
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