The country is about to throw itself a 250th birthday party. The polling suggests many of the guests are ambivalent.
A 25-year low
Just 53 percent of U.S. adults say they are "extremely" or "very" proud to be American, according to a Gallup poll conducted June 1-15 — the lowest in the survey's 25-year history. The share who say they are extremely proud has fallen to 33 percent, down eight points from a year earlier and well below the roughly two-thirds who felt that way around 2004. Gallup also found that only 43 percent of Americans now fly a flag outside their home.
Pride in institutions is slipping too
The erosion runs deeper than national identity in the abstract. An AP-NORC poll found steep drops since 2017 in pride across specific institutions: pride in the armed forces fell to 59 percent from 78 percent, pride in U.S. history to 44 percent from 58 percent, and pride in American democracy to 28 percent from 42 percent. Just a third of Americans told the pollster they believe the American Dream still exists for most people.
A historic partisan gap
No finding is starker than the divide between the parties. On overall national pride, Gallup recorded a 56-point gap — the widest it has measured — between Republicans (93 percent extremely or very proud) and Democrats (27 percent), with independents at 51 percent. Much of the decade-long decline has been driven by Democrats, whose pride in the military and in America's standing abroad has fallen sharply. A Marquette Law School poll found a similar split, with 88 percent of Republicans expressing pride in the country versus 49 percent of Democrats.
The drop has been sharpest among younger Americans and women: Gallup found "extremely proud" sentiment among adults 18 to 34 at just 14 percent.
Party planners, lukewarm guests
The timing is conspicuous. July 4, 2026 marks the semiquincentennial — 250 years since the Declaration of Independence — and the government and communities have planned major commemorations. Yet the Marquette poll found only about a quarter of Americans have heard "a lot" about the anniversary, and interest splits sharply along party lines.
The picture is not uniformly bleak: two-thirds of Americans still tell Marquette they are at least somewhat proud of the country, three-quarters agree "America is better than most countries," and the values cited most often as central to national identity — free speech, the right to vote, freedom of religion — command broad agreement across the AP-NORC sample. The surveys, taken together, sketch a nation that largely agrees on the ideals it was founded on, and sharply disagrees about whether it is living up to them.
