AP-NORC poll finds Americans deeply split on national identity

Americans are heading into the nation’s 250th anniversary with pride intact, but their answers about what the United States stands for split sharply by party and tone. In an open-ended AP-NORC survey of 2,596 adults, about 2 in 10 used words such as great, prosperous or powerful to describe the country, while others reached for struggling, declining, corruption and unfairness.

The partisan divide was stark. Roughly 3 in 10 Republicans described the United States in positive terms, compared with about 1 in 10 Democrats. The gap showed up again when respondents were asked what unites most Americans: about 2 in 10 pointed to freedom or liberty, while others named politics, values, patriotism, morality and compassion.

That mix of answers makes the 250th anniversary a stress test for national identity as much as a celebration of it. The poll’s open-ended format allowed people to speak in their own words rather than choosing from preset labels, and those words exposed a country that still shares a civic vocabulary but not always a shared interpretation of it.

The same divide appeared in earlier AP-NORC findings released in June. Only about one-quarter of Americans said the United States stands above all other countries, 44 percent said it is one of the greatest countries in the world along with some others, and about 3 in 10 said there are better countries than the United States. That last figure was up from 19 percent in an AP-NORC poll conducted in June 2016.

Americans also sounded less certain about democratic government as a core part of the national story. About two-thirds said a democratically elected government is highly important to America’s identity in 2026, down from 80 percent in 2021. At the same time, only a third said the American Dream still holds true, even as nearly 9 in 10 said freedom of speech and the right to vote are important to the nation’s identity, and 8 in 10 said freedom of religion matters.

Derricka Wall, 24, of Chickasaw, Alabama, captured that strain in personal terms. She said the problem is “the people in office, not democracy itself,” and described a sense that the safeguards Americans once expected from the founding era have been weakened by today’s political system.

The polling lands as America 250 commemorations are already visible at the U.S. Capitol and along the National Mall in Washington, where the country is marking its past while arguing over what its present still means.