As recently as a decade ago, about half of Americans had a positive view of Russia. And even after Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, 22 percent of Americans — including 37 percent of Republicans — said they still had a favorable view of President Vladimir Putin.
Times have certainly changed.
A new poll from the Wall Street Journal on Friday reinforced that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has turned Putin into what can only be described as a pariah. Fully 90 percent of Americans now have an unfavorable view of the Russian president (86 percent “very unfavorable”), while just 4 percent have a favorable one.
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 he was overthrown in 1979, for what it’s worth.)
Putin is now more unpopular in the United States than former Cuban president Fidel Castro generally was. He also outpaces some lesser-known figures like Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and former Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, as well as former Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, who was viewed unfavorably 76-to-3 shortly before he in 1999 became the first sitting world head of state to be charged with war crimes — a prospect Putin faces.
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.)
It’s, of course, not at all surprising that Putin would suddenly be vastly unpopular. But the degree matters, including when it comes to Americans’ appetite for taking steps to combat him, including steps that could lead to higher gas prices.
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.
