President Barack Obama will hand over his title to President-elect Donald Trump on Jan. 20, but Obama will hold onto another crown for the next year: most admired man in America.
Obama earned the distinction for the ninth consecutive time in Gallup’s annual survey. Gallup has been conducing the poll since 1946. Obama’s nine first-place finishes are second only to former President Dwight Eisenhower’s 12.
Trump finished second with 15 percent of the vote, seven percentage points behind Obama, who first won the title as President-elect in 2008 and has held it through his two terms as president. It is Obama’s closest margin of victory.
In the 70 years Gallup has conducted the poll, the sitting president has won 58 times.
Trump has now finished in the top 10 six times — 1988-90, 2011, 2015-16.
In an interview with his former campaign chief strategist David Axelrod, Obama intimated that he could have beaten Trump had he been allowed to run for re-election.
“I am confident in this vision because I'm confident that if I -- if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could've mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it,” Obama told Axelrod.
Trump put out a his response on Twitter.