When Dolly Parton died this week, everyone mourned. She was the queen of country music and a magnetic actress, enrapturing the public with her bodacious but kind personality. She was a feminist icon and also a gay icon. She was a devout Christian and a loyal wife. There was something about her for everyone to love.
In the wake of her death, a data enthusiast on Reddit put together a chart showing Parton’s incredible favorability among both Republicans and Democrats, using data collected by the UMass Lowell Center for Public Opinion. The results were extraordinary, showing that she was one of the last famous figures to be loved across the political spectrum.
The data showed that most other figures, like Donald Trump or Taylor Swift, are beloved by one party and despised by the other, in a clear illustration of how divisive politics have become in a toxic era of discourse.
One figure stood out, though: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, instead of being adored by one faction and reviled by the other, is simply detested by almost everybody.
The dichotomy is incredible. Parton boasted 78 percent favorability among Democrats, the UMASS CPC data showed, and 73 percent favorability among Republicans. As expected, she’s pretty much universally adored.
Zuckerberg, by contrast, had just 8 percent favorability among Democrats, and 13 percent among Republicans — and that’s only after he’s spent the past few years worming himself into Trump’s good graces. And yet, fewer Republicans expressed a favorable opinion of him than they did Barack Obama (14 percent), the data also showed.
Zuckerberg, in sum, is the inverse of Dolly Parton: almost nobody likes him, regardless of their political leanings (the only other figure in the data with comparable ratings, tellingly, was Russian dictator Vladimir Putin, with 2 percent favorability among Democrats and 6 percent among Republicans.)
Besides embodying the kind of out-of-touch wealthy Silicon Valley elite that Republicans really hate, Republicans also probably haven’t forgiven Zuckerberg for supposedly helping “steal” the 2020 election from Trump (for which Trump threatened to imprison him as he sought the Oval Office for a third time in 2024). And unlike Elon Musk, Zuckerberg lacks any kind of compelling personality and doesn’t really get involved in the ever-raging culture wars.
Zuckerberg’s company Meta is also regularly embroiled in all kinds of horrifying scandals, like how it let the Trump-linked consulting firm Cambridge Analytica harvest data on tens of millions of users to generate psychological profiles on them to target voters in political campaigns. Its smart glasses are spying on people and being used by weirdos to harass women. Facebook remains a breeding ground of hate speech, and was recently caught paying Nazis to post there. He’s pouring billions of dollars into AI nonsense that no one wants, while treating his own workers like cattle. And the list goes on.
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