As the nation prepares to mark its 250th birthday, a new Reuters/Ipsos poll lays bare a gap in patriotic sentiment so wide it reads less like a disagreement and more like two countries sharing the same calendar date. Just 27 percent of Democrats say they will display an American flag or flag bunting outside their home this Independence Day. Among Republicans, the number is 64 percent.
The survey of 1,537 U.S. adults, conducted June 12, 15, found the partisan divide extends well beyond the flagpole. It touches what the holiday means, whether people plan to celebrate it at all, and whether the United States deserves to be called the greatest country on earth. On every measure, the New York Post reported, Republicans outpaced Democrats by double digits, and often by margins of two or three to one.
The numbers arrive at a moment when the country is supposed to be rallying around a shared milestone. America turns 250 this Fourth of July. The poll suggests half the political spectrum isn't much in the mood.
The Reuters/Ipsos data paints a detailed picture. Sixty-five percent of Republicans described July 4 as "a day where I celebrate the United States of America." Only 24 percent of Democrats said the same.
Democrats and independents were 11 percentage points more likely than Republicans to call Independence Day "just like any other day." And nearly a quarter of Democrats and independents, 24 percent, said they do not plan to celebrate the holiday at all. Among Republicans, that figure was 8 percent.
The divide showed up in the small details, too. More than half of Republicans, 52 percent, said they planned to wear red, white, and blue. Twenty percent of Democrats said so. Forty-six percent of Republicans planned to attend a fireworks show, compared with 28 percent of Democrats. And Republicans were more than twice as likely to attend a parade or festival: 20 percent versus 9 percent.
These are not esoteric policy disagreements. They are choices about whether to show up for the most basic civic ritual the country has.
Perhaps the starkest finding sits at the bottom of the poll. Sixty-two percent of Republicans said they believe the United States is the greatest country in the world. Among Democrats, that number was 11 percent.
Read that again. Barely one in ten Democratic respondents were willing to affirm American greatness, in a survey taken weeks before the nation's semiquincentennial. The gap is not a rounding error. It is a 51-point chasm.
That number matters because it frames everything else. If you don't believe the country is worth celebrating, you're unlikely to hang a flag, pull on a stars-and-stripes shirt, or drag your family to a fireworks show. The poll results track that logic almost perfectly.
The pattern is consistent with behavior voters have seen from prominent Democrats in recent years. A Democratic congressional candidate in California made headlines for refusing the Pledge of Allegiance and turning her back on the flag, a gesture that drew national attention and seemed to capture a broader mood inside the party's activist base.
A separate Fox News survey, described as recent, asked voters whether Americans are united by shared values or divided by different ones. Fifty-eight percent of voters chose "divided." Only 42 percent said "united."
The breakdown by party was telling. Sixty-two percent of Democrats said the country is separated by different values. Among independents, 65 percent agreed. Republicans were the most evenly split: 49 percent said shared values still hold the country together, while 50 percent said they do not.
Fox News reported that Vice President JD Vance, cited during a panel discussion, said "too many Democrats don't show appreciation for the country." The Reuters/Ipsos data gives that claim hard numbers to stand on.
When the party that controls a significant share of the nation's cultural institutions, universities, media companies, entertainment studios, cannot muster even a quarter of its voters to fly the flag on the Fourth of July, the problem is no longer a messaging gap. It is a values gap.
Polls are snapshots, not destiny. But this snapshot lands in a year when Democratic leaders have made choices that reinforce the pattern. Some have openly prioritized international partnerships over domestic solidarity. Sen. Elissa Slotkin recently traveled to Canada for a center-left summit with Prime Minister Mark Carney, focused on coordinating against the political right, a trip that raised questions about where certain Democrats locate their loyalties.
None of this happens in a vacuum. The Reuters/Ipsos poll did not ask respondents why they feel the way they do. It did not probe whether the reluctance to celebrate is rooted in policy frustration, cultural alienation, or something else entirely. Those are open questions the data cannot answer.
But the data does answer a simpler question: Are Republicans and Democrats experiencing the same country on July 4? The answer, by every metric the poll measured, is no.
Consider the accumulation. A 37-point gap on flag display. A 41-point gap on calling the holiday a celebration of America. A 32-point gap on wearing patriotic colors. A 51-point gap on whether the country is the greatest in the world. A 16-point gap on attending fireworks. An 11-point gap on attending parades. And a 16-point gap on whether to celebrate the day at all.
That is not a disagreement about tax rates or trade policy. It is a disagreement about whether the American project is worth honoring.
America's semiquincentennial is supposed to be a unifying occasion. The country has survived a civil war, two world wars, a depression, a Cold War, and the fractures of the 1960s. Each time, the Fourth of July served as a reset, a day when the arguments paused and the shared inheritance took precedence.
The Reuters/Ipsos poll suggests that tradition is fraying on one side of the aisle far faster than the other. Republicans are not uniformly enthusiastic, 36 percent still won't fly a flag, and 8 percent won't celebrate at all, but the overwhelming majority plan to mark the day in some visible way.
Democrats, by contrast, appear to be opting out in large numbers. When House Democrats have spent recent months focused on procedural maneuvers like a 25th Amendment bill rather than articulating a positive vision for the country, the poll results start to look less like an anomaly and more like the natural endpoint of a party that has spent years teaching its voters to see America through a lens of grievance rather than gratitude.
The poll's methodology has limits. The sample of 1,537 adults is standard for national surveys, but the margin of error and weighting details were not included in the published reporting. The exact question wording was not reproduced. Those caveats matter. They do not, however, erase a 37-point gap on something as elemental as hanging a flag.
The 11 percent figure deserves special attention. When barely one in ten Democrats will say the United States is the greatest country in the world, the party has a problem that no campaign consultant can fix with better messaging. That is a conviction deficit, and it shows up at the flagpole, at the parade route, and at the fireworks show.
Republicans, for all the internal debates the party faces, remain overwhelmingly willing to say the country is worth celebrating. Sixty-two percent call it the greatest nation on earth. Nearly two-thirds plan to fly the flag. They are showing up.
The question heading into this 250th Independence Day is not whether the country is perfect. No serious person claims it is. The question is whether you believe the American experiment, self-government, individual liberty, the Constitution, is something worth honoring on the one day a year set aside for exactly that purpose.
For most Republicans, the answer is yes. For most Democrats, the poll says, the answer is complicated at best and absent at worst.
A country where only 27 percent of one major party will fly the flag on the Fourth of July is a country with a patriotism problem, and it isn't coming from the people hanging the bunting.
