After a long, bloody campaign to see who will live at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the next four years, most Americans are probably exhausted by political races. That said, we turned our eyes to quite a different race this week. The race to meet the President of the United States …. vs. your favorite professional athlete.
Rest easy, the President is cleaning up in that race. We haven’t (yet) become that sports-obsessed as a nation.
In fact, the President leads by about 20 percentage points (45% vs 24%) in most demographic categories – except with young men and obsessed sports fans. For men ages 18-29, President Obama is in a virtual dead heat, winning the meet-and-greet by only 2 percentage points over a professional athlete (43% vs 41%).
The party split is also fairly compelling – but not surprising.
- Democrats overwhelmingly would rather meet the President than their favorite sports hero (65% vs 16%) while Independents are more mixed (37% vs 26%) and Republicans actually favor meeting the athlete (25% vs 33%).
Likely these percentages reflect the fact that there was a Democrat in office at the time of the poll which was conducted prior to election day and would have been the reverse had we asked the same question five years ago.
Who is your favorite professional athlete? And if you had a chance to meet him or her, would you forsake that opportunity to go visit the White House?
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