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Dolly Parton beats Obama to top list of most loved global figures in US poll
14th April, 2026 03:54 PM
For the US public, the feeling that Dolly Parton expressed in her country music chart-topping 1974 classic I Will Always Love You is clearly mutual.
A poll of Americans’ opinions about more than 20 international luminaries established as much, with the 11-time Grammy winner and philanthropist leaving her two closest competitors – Barack Obama and Volodymyr Zelenskyy – in the dust by more than 50 percentage points.
Of 1,000 people surveyed by the University of Massachusetts and the market research firm YouGov heading into April, 70 per cent of them had a favourable impression of Parton, an 11-time Grammy winner. Only 5% had an unfavourable impression of her, giving her a net favourability of 65 per cent.
Obama, the US president from 2009 to 2017, had the poll’s next highest net favorability at 14per cent. He scored 50 per cent favorability and 36 per cent unfavorability among those surveyed.
And rounding out the poll’s metaphorical podium with a 12 per cent net favorability was Zelenskyy, the president of Ukraine, who has been defending his country from invading Russian forces since February 2022. He arrived at that number after 35 per cent of those surveyed reported having a favourable opinion of him, and 22 per cent indicated an unfavourable view of him.
Parton and Obama were the only public figures in the poll about whom at least half of the survey’s respondents had a favourable opinion.
The only other US president in the poll to end up with a net favorability was George W Bush (5 per cent), comfortably ahead of Donald Trump (-18 per cent) and Joe Biden (19 per cent). An obvious Grammy-winning comparison to Parton, Taylor Swift earned a net positivity of 3 per cent.
Vladimir Putin, Russia’s president, landed on the complete opposite end of the spectrum as Parton, with a -65 net favorability.
Beside Parton’s nearly seven-decade musical career and her acting on films such as the critically acclaimed 9 to 5, a factor in her over-performance on the UMass/YouGov poll is almost certainly her mostly apolitical public relations strategy.
“Everybody I don’t do politics,” she said in a 2017 interview cited by the political news outlet The Hill. “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 prolific philanthropic work, meanwhile, has surely won her many admirers.
Her Dollywood Foundation’s Imagination Library has donated more than 270m books to children younger than five across the US and in Canada, the UK, Ireland and Australia.
Among other generous deeds, she donated $1m to Vanderbilt University Medical Center in her home state of Tennessee to aid efforts culminating in the Moderna vaccine that helped end the Covid-19 pandemic.
She has also given Vanderbilt funds to research pediatric infectious diseases, gave more than $12m to families who lost their homes to 2016 wildfires in Tennessee and received the prestigious Carnegie medal of philanthropy in 2022, as Time noted in recognising her as one of its most influential philanthropists in 2025.
“I just give from my heart,” Parton said as she accepted the Carnegie medal. “I just see a need, and if I can fill it, then I will.”
