Poll Finds Americans’ Pride In Their Country Is Decreasing As 250th Celebration Approaches

A new poll found that most Americans no longer believe in the American dream.

The Associated Press-NORC poll gauged how Americans feel about their country as the nation’s 250th anniversary approaches. The poll defined the American dream as the notion that if you work hard, you can get ahead.

Only a third of poll respondents said that the American Dream still held true. Half said that while the dream once was true, it no longer is, and 15 percent say that it never was true.

The survey found that Republicans are more than twice as likely as independents and Democrats to believe that the American Dream still holds true with 57 percent saying to, compared to 24 percent of independents and 17 percent of Democrats.

Other findings in the poll suggested a sagging national pride.

For example, the AP reported that only 25 percent said that the U.S. is the best country in the world, while 44 percent said that it was one of the greatest countries in the world. Another 30 percent say that there are better countries than the U.S.

Younger respondents tended to think less of the U.S. compared to other countries. The AP reported that 44 percent of adult respondents under 30 said there were other countrie that were better than the U.S. By comparison, only 22 percent of respondents over 60 said the same thing.

Only about two-thirds of respondents said that a democratically elected government was highly important to the U.S., down from 80 percent in 2021, the AP reported.

“It’s not that the democracy part is not working,” Derricka Wall, 24, of Chickasaw, Alabama told the AP. “It’s the people that are actually being put in office that is the problem.”

The nationwide poll surveyed 2,596 adults from April 16 to April 20. The overall margin of sampling error was +/- 2.6 percentage points.