SHOCKING: Democrats Hit Record Low On American Pride Before…

New polling data from Gallup reveals one of the most dramatic collapses in measurable public sentiment in the organization’s quarter century of tracking the question: the share of Democratic voters who say they are extremely or very proud to be American has fallen from roughly 90 percent at the dawn of the millennium to just 36 percent today, a plunge of more than 50 percentage points in less than 25 years.

The numbers, which have been drawing significant attention in conservative media and among Republican lawmakers in the weeks leading up to the nation’s 250th anniversary, represent the longest-running and most granular data set available on partisan differences in national pride.

Gallup began asking Americans how proud they were to be citizens of the United States in 2001, and the resulting trend line now charts one of the most lopsided partisan divergences the polling organization has ever documented.

In the early years of the survey, Democratic and Republican pride tracked close together. At the start of the 2000s, approximately 90 percent of both Democrats and Republicans described themselves as extremely or very proud to be American, a margin of just a few percentage points that suggested national identity was, at that time, not a meaningfully partisan variable. The country was united in the aftermath of September 11, 2001, and expressions of patriotism crossed party lines with little friction.

That portrait has been transformed almost beyond recognition over the intervening two decades. Republican pride has remained relatively stable across the same period, climbing modestly to reach 92 percent in Gallup’s most recent full annual release, conducted in June of last year.

The GOP number has fluctuated somewhat depending on which party holds the White House, dipping during the Obama years and recovering during Republican presidencies, but has never fallen below 68 percent.

Democratic pride has followed a sharply different trajectory. It declined modestly through the mid-2000s, stabilized during the Obama years when Democrats controlled the White House, and then began a steeper descent after 2020.

The most dramatic single year drop occurred between Gallup’s 2024 and 2025 surveys, when Democratic pride fell 26 points in a single cycle, collapsing from 62 percent to just 36 percent. That 36 percent figure represents a record low for Democratic voters in the history of the survey.

At 36 percent, the share of Democrats saying they are extremely or very proud to be American has now fallen below the majority threshold and sits more than 55 points below the Republican figure of 92 percent. That gap is, by any historical comparison within Gallup’s own data, without precedent. When Gallup began this particular survey more than two decades ago, the partisan gap on pride was in the single digits.

A separate NBC News survey conducted in June of this year found even sharper figures, with only 29 percent of Democrats telling NBC’s pollsters that they were extremely or very proud to be American, compared with 90 percent of Republicans.

CNN senior data analyst Harry Enten highlighted those numbers on air, calling the partisan divide one of the most stunning he had ever encountered in years of working with public opinion data, a remarkable admission from a figure at a network not typically known for amplifying unflattering coverage of the political left.

The generational dimension of the pride collapse is equally striking. Gallup’s longer-running data shows that just 41 percent of Generation Z adults, those born roughly between 1997 and 2012, expressed extreme or very strong national pride in a composite spanning 2021 through 2025, compared with 83 percent of the oldest Americans in the Silent Generation. Since younger cohorts lean significantly more Democratic, the youth factor and the partisan factor reinforce one another, driving the overall Democratic figure toward historic lows.

A Reuters and Ipsos survey released in the weeks before the Fourth of July holiday added another dimension to the picture. Only 27 percent of Democrats said they planned to fly an American flag for Independence Day this year, compared with 64 percent of Republicans. The contrast is especially stark against 2021 data from the same pollster showing that 65 percent of Democrats planned to fly the flag at that time, suggesting that whatever forces are driving the Democratic pride collapse have intensified significantly and rapidly over the past four years.

The behavioral gap extends to questions about where Americans would prefer to live. A poll from Elon University and YouGov found that 55 percent of Democrats said there is another country they would rather call home than the United States, compared with just 38 percent of independents and 10 percent of Republicans. That survey, which circulated widely on social media, prompted commentators across the conservative media landscape to draw the sharpest possible conclusions about what the data reveals about the modern Democratic voter’s relationship with the country.

Republican elected officials have been quick to weaponize the numbers. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri referenced the polling in the context of his broader critique of the Democratic Party’s cultural trajectory, while Representative Matt Gaetz and others pointed to the figures as vindication of the argument that the left has undergone a fundamental transformation in how it relates to American identity. Former President Biden and the broader Democratic establishment have largely declined to address the polling directly.

CNN contributor Scott Jennings, one of the network’s most prominent conservative voices, used a panel discussion earlier this month to lay the numbers alongside one another in stark terms. His argument was that the data confirmed a pattern he and others had observed for years, that Democratic enthusiasm for America tends to track closely with which party controls the White House, but that the latest collapse has gone well beyond the historical pattern of partisan ebb and flow, falling to levels that have no precedent in the modern era regardless of who occupies 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Gallup’s own researchers have offered more measured explanations for the trajectory. The organization has noted that Republican pride also dips, sometimes sharply, when Democrats hold the presidency, pointing to a reading below 70 percent during Obama’s second term. The difference, Gallup has observed, is that Democratic pride has sustained a longer and steeper decline that has continued even as the political environment shifts, rather than recovering during periods of Democratic political success the way Republican pride typically does when the GOP wins power.

The PRRI organization, conducting its own parallel polling in May of this year, found that only 51 percent of Americans overall said they were extremely or very proud to be American, and that the figures became even more deflating when broken down by specific dimensions of national life. Only 49 percent said they were proud of America’s 250-year history. Just 34 percent were proud of its economic record. Only 24 percent expressed pride in the country’s moral example abroad. And a striking 18 percent said they were proud of how American democracy is functioning today.

Pew Research Center data from the beginning of this year painted a similarly bleak national mood as a backdrop. A January Pew survey found only 29 percent of Americans satisfied with the direction of the country overall, with 69 percent expressing dissatisfaction. Majorities expected the economy to weaken, political divisions to deepen, and America’s global standing to decline over the next generation. That pessimism is distributed across partisan lines, though it concentrates most heavily among Democratic voters and younger Americans.

Critics of the conservative framing of the patriotism data argue that the numbers reflect frustration with specific policies and the current political leadership rather than any rejection of America as a country or idea. They point out that pride figures for Republicans also declined significantly during the Obama years and that measuring love of country through a polling question about pride introduces complications that a single percentage point figure cannot resolve.

Whatever the proper interpretation, the sheer scale and speed of the shift is difficult to explain away. A 54 point drop in Democratic national pride over two and a half decades, with a 26 point freefall concentrated in the single year between 2024 and 2025, represents a change in measurable political culture that goes well beyond normal partisan fluctuation. Nothing in Gallup’s historical record for this question comes close to a swing of this magnitude for either party in such a compressed timeframe.

The timing of the collapse, arriving as the country prepares to mark its 250th year as a nation, has given the polling an additional layer of cultural resonance. Anniversary events and patriotic programming around the Semiquincentennial are intended to project a sense of shared national identity, but the gap between how Democratic and Republican voters currently relate to that identity makes a unified national celebration a more complicated proposition than organizers had perhaps hoped.

Conservative commentators have argued that the data reveals something more fundamental than policy disagreement, pointing to what they describe as a generation of education and cultural messaging that has emphasized the country’s historical failures over its achievements, producing a cohort of Democratic-leaning voters who struggle to articulate pride in a country they have been told, through schools and popular culture and social media alike, is irredeemably compromised.