Ahead of the nation’s 250th birthday, a wave of new polling swept across American media outlets, much of it eager to paint the country as hopelessly divided and drowning in self-doubt. Yet buried inside the data that outlets like YouGov and The Economist reported themselves, a very different and far more encouraging story emerges. A full 73 percent of Americans say they are proud to be American, including a remarkable 96 percent of Republicans. That is not the portrait of a nation in crisis. That is the portrait of a country that, whatever its disagreements, still overwhelmingly believes in itself.
The survey found that only 14 percent of adult citizens say they are not proud to be American, with another 13 percent unsure. In other words, roughly seven in ten Americans hold a clear and unambiguous sense of pride in their country, a number that should have been the headline of every network newscast leading into the Fourth of July. Instead, much of the legacy media chose to lead with the shrinking slice of the electorate, disproportionately concentrated among Democrats, who have talked themselves into believing the country’s best days are behind it.
That partisan gap is where the real story lies, and it is not a story that reflects well on the political left. According to the same polling, the share of Democrats who say they are proud to be American has fallen to 58 percent, down from 66 percent just two years earlier. Nearly a quarter of Democrats, 24 percent, now say outright that they are not proud to be American. Compare that to Republicans, where less than 1 percent say the same. The gap is not subtle. It is a chasm, and it has been widening for years under the influence of activists and politicians who have made national self loathing a core part of their political identity.
Other major surveys released around the same time confirm the pattern, even as they use different methodologies and different wording. Gallup’s long running measure of American pride found that patriotism among Republicans remains sky high, with 93 percent expressing high levels of pride in their country when combining “extremely proud” and “very proud” responses. Independents came in at 51 percent and Democrats at just 27 percent, both record lows for their respective groups in the 25 year history of Gallup’s tracking. The overall national figure fell alongside those partisan trends, but the driving force behind the decline is unmistakable. It is not conservative America that has lost faith in the country. It is the left.
An NPR, PBS News, and Marist poll released the same week told an almost identical story. Ninety three percent of Republicans in that survey said they were proud to be American, with 65 percent describing themselves as “very proud.” Independents were not far behind at 61 percent. Democrats, once again, trailed badly, with just 45 percent describing themselves as proud. The consistency across multiple independent pollsters, each using its own sample and its own wording, removes any doubt that this is a fluke or a statistical anomaly. It is a real and durable trend.
It is worth pausing on what this actually means. For decades, patriotism in America was something close to a bipartisan value, a baseline assumption shared across the political spectrum even amid disagreements over policy. That consensus has visibly frayed, and it has frayed almost entirely on one side of the aisle. As recently as 2013, more than 80 percent of all Americans, regardless of party, described themselves as extremely or very proud of their national identity in polling from the Public Religion Research Institute. Today that combined figure has fallen to about half, and the collapse has been driven overwhelmingly by declining pride among Democrats and, to a lesser extent, independents.
Even amid the more pessimistic headline numbers from Gallup and others, a separate and broader measure from the Cato Institute, conducted in partnership with Morning Consult, found that Americans across the political spectrum still hold deeply positive views of the country’s founding itself. Eighty six percent of respondents said they are grateful to be Americans, and 79 percent called themselves proud, with majorities of Democrats, Republicans, and independents alike expressing favorable views of the nation’s founding. That finding should complicate the media narrative of a hopelessly polarized country. Even Democrats, when asked directly about the founding rather than about the current political moment, remain largely positive. What appears to be driving the partisan pride gap is not a rejection of America’s founding principles so much as a rejection, on the left, of the current political leadership and direction of the country.
That distinction matters enormously, and it is one that conservative commentators have been making for years. There is a difference between healthy disagreement over policy and a wholesale abandonment of national pride. What the polling shows is that a meaningful and growing segment of the Democratic coalition has crossed that line, treating dissatisfaction with a Republican administration as a reason to disavow pride in the country itself. That is not how previous generations of Americans, including previous generations of Democrats, responded to political setbacks. It reflects something new and considerably more corrosive, a tendency to conflate the nation with whichever party currently holds power.
The timing of these findings, arriving just as the country marked 250 years of independence, could not be more significant. This was supposed to be a moment of national unity, a chance for Americans of every political persuasion to set aside their disagreements and celebrate a shared inheritance of liberty that no other nation on earth can claim. Instead, prominent Democrats used the occasion to deliver blistering critiques of the country’s direction, a pattern discussed at length elsewhere in this publication’s coverage of the holiday. It should come as no surprise that rank and file Democratic voters, taking their cues from party leaders who spent the Fourth of July talking about “sins” rather than “grace and greatness,” report declining pride in their own country.
Conservatives have long argued that the steady drumbeat of national self criticism promoted by segments of the academic and media establishment carries real consequences. This polling data supplies the evidence. When an entire generation of students is taught that the American founding was defined primarily by its injustices rather than its unprecedented achievement in establishing self government, when the nation’s flag and anthem become subjects of protest rather than unifying symbols, when politicians spend Independence Day cataloging grievances instead of expressing gratitude, the result is predictable. Pride erodes. Faith in the American project weakens. And the numbers bear that out precisely along the ideological lines one would expect.
Encouragingly, the picture is not universally bleak, even within the polling that generated the most pessimistic headlines. The Gallup survey found that Americans aged 55 and older remain far more likely to express high levels of pride than younger generations, suggesting the erosion in patriotism is concentrated among those who came of age during an era of relentless institutional criticism of the country, rather than reflecting some permanent shift in the American character. That generational pattern points toward both the source of the problem and a possible path back, through a renewed emphasis on civic education that tells the full American story, its triumphs as well as its struggles, rather than a curriculum weighted entirely toward grievance.
It is also worth noting that pride in the country and confidence in current political institutions are not the same thing, and pollsters increasingly find that Americans separate the two. A person can be deeply proud of the Constitution, the nation’s founding principles, and the extraordinary freedoms Americans enjoy while also being frustrated with Congress, the media, or a particular administration. That distinction helps explain why measures of institutional trust have fallen even as core American identity, for most citizens, remains a source of pride rather than shame.
None of this is to dismiss the very real divisions in the country or to pretend that every American shares the same rosy outlook. But the loudest voices declaring America to be a fundamentally broken or irredeemable project do not represent the views of most Americans, even by their own polling. Nearly three in four citizens say they are proud of their country. Nearly all Republicans do. A clear majority of independents do. And even among Democrats, a majority, though a shrinking one, still say the same.
The media coverage of this polling season told a story that was technically accurate in its details but badly distorted in its emphasis. Headlines proclaimed a “25 year low” in patriotism and a nation “divided” heading into its 250th birthday, while burying the fact that overwhelming majorities across every major survey still express pride and gratitude for their country. That framing was not accidental. It reflects a media establishment more comfortable reporting on American decline than American strength, more eager to interview the disillusioned federal employee in Maryland than the retired teacher in New Jersey who called the country’s freedoms a gift he does not take for granted.
Conservative Americans have known this instinctively for years, but now the data confirms it in black and white. Patriotism is not dead in America. It is alive and well among the vast majority of citizens who still believe, as the founders did, that this nation represents something extraordinary in human history. What has changed is that one political coalition has increasingly detached its own sense of national pride from the fortunes of its preferred political party, a dangerous and unprecedented development that deserves far more scrutiny than it has received.
As the country moves further into its 250th anniversary year, with celebrations continuing through the end of 2026 under the America 250 Task Force, these polling numbers offer a needed corrective to the doom and gloom narrative pushed by much of the press. Seventy three percent of the country, and virtually the entire Republican coalition, remain proud of what America is and what it has achieved over two and a half centuries. That is a foundation worth building on, and it is a far stronger foundation than the country’s critics would have Americans believe.
The task now for conservative leaders, and for anyone who cares about the long term health of the American experiment, is to ensure that this pride is not allowed to erode further among the young. That means insisting on honest civic education that presents the founding as the remarkable achievement it was, without pretending the nation has been without flaws. It means continuing to push back against a media and academic culture that treats patriotism as naive or embarrassing. And it means recognizing that the fight over how Americans understand their own history is not an abstract cultural debate. It is a fight over whether the next generation will inherit the same confidence in their country that three quarters of Americans still hold today.
