Democrats get awfully touchy when anybody questions whether they love this country as much as Donald Trump’s voters do.
Their allies in the press call that question a cheap partisan smear.
And Gallup just caught Democrats giving one answer about America that they can’t spin away.
Twelve Choices on the Menu and Democrats Shoved Patriotism to the Back
Gallup put a simple question to 3,199 Americans in an online survey that ran from May 12 to May 22, 2026. Which values, the pollster wanted to know, does the country need most right now?
Respondents could pick three from a list of 12. Kindness made the list. So did freedom and integrity.
Republicans didn’t need long to think it over. Patriotism topped their list, with 46% naming it among their three picks. Responsibility came in second at 41%, and honesty landed third at 38%.
Democrats went another direction entirely.
Just 6% of them chose patriotism. That dropped love of country to dead last among all 12 options on the Democrat side of the ledger.
Equality led the Democrat list at 44%. Fairness followed at 34%, with honesty close behind at 32%.
Read that one more time. Out of a dozen choices, Democrats rated patriotism below every other value Gallup offered, and they did it about six weeks before America’s 250th birthday on July 4, 2026.
The Pride Numbers Already Sounded the Alarm in June
The values survey didn’t come out of nowhere.
Gallup released its annual national pride poll in late June 2026, right ahead of the semiquincentennial, and the results went over on the Left about as well as a skunk at a church picnic. Only 14% of Democrats told Gallup they felt “extremely proud” to be Americans. Among Republicans, 70% said the same.
That 56-point gap set a record. Gallup started asking the question in 2001 and had never measured a wider split between the parties.
Add in the folks who called themselves “very proud,” and Republicans climb to 93%. Democrats reach 27%.
And the slide didn’t start with the 2024 election. In June 2025, Gallup found just 36% of Democrats extremely or very proud of their country, down from 62% only a year earlier.
Gallup spotted the pattern long ago. Back in 2017, the pollster wrote that Democrats’ patriotism looked “susceptible to considerations such as which party occupies the White House.” Republicans, by Gallup’s own account, held steady no matter who sat in the Oval Office.
But think about what that means in plain English. For a big chunk of Democrats, America only earns their affection when their side holds the keys.
Jefferson Wrote Down the Equality Promise 250 Years Ago
Democrats will point to “equality” at the top of their list and call it proof of their good intentions.
Thomas Jefferson got there first. The Declaration of Independence spells it out plainly: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights.”
But that’s exactly the problem for Democrats. Equality before God and the law didn’t fall out of the sky. Americans wrote it down, fought a revolution over it, and defended it for two and a half centuries. Nobody can honestly prize the promise while shrugging at the country that kept it.
And the modern Democrat brand of equality looks nothing like Jefferson’s. The party’s DEI programs sort Americans by skin color and hand out preferences accordingly. Jefferson promised equal rights, while today’s Left wants bureaucrats in Washington, DC deciding who gets what and calling the result fairness.
Republicans picked responsibility as their second-highest value. Democrats left it out of their top three entirely. One side wants citizens pulling their own weight, and the other wants a federal referee doling out fairness by the pound.
And faith shows the same gulf. A 2025 Gallup-Aspen Ideas survey found 48% of Republicans counted faith among their most important personal values, compared with 11% of Democrats. For a country built on Christian principles, that gap says plenty on its own.
The Generation That Remembers the Cold War Still Gets It
There’s a bright spot tucked inside the Gallup numbers, and it belongs to older Americans.
Gallup also asked which values Americans think they already share. Adults 65 and older picked patriotism 38% of the time, compared with 31% of those 18 to 39 and 29% of those 40 to 64. Older Americans chose service far more often too, at 39% against 26% and 28% for the younger groups.
That tracks. Folks who said the Pledge every morning in class, watched men walk on the moon, and cheered when the Berlin Wall came down know what this country can do. They don’t need a pollster to tell them America deserves their loyalty.
But the younger crowd spent years in government schools and newsrooms that treat the flag like an embarrassing relative at Thanksgiving. Gallup’s June poll found only 14% of Americans ages 18 to 34 felt extremely proud of their country.
Democrats Want to Tear Up the Whole Thing Before the Midterms
Patriotism isn’t the only place the two parties part ways.
An Associated Press-NORC survey found half of Democrats hoping for a “complete and total upheaval” in the 2026 midterm elections. Only 13% of Republicans said the same.
Put those two polls side by side, and the picture gets uncomfortable for Democrat strategists. A party that ranks love of country dead last also wants to rip everything up and start over. Maybe the two findings have nothing to do with each other. Maybe. It would make for one strange coincidence.
And Americans of every stripe sense something slipping. Gallup’s May 2026 moral values survey found a record 56% of Americans rating the nation’s moral values as poor.
But Democrats will insist the values poll doesn’t mean they dislike America. They’ll say patriotism simply felt less urgent than equality or fairness at the moment.
Gallup closed its survey on May 22, 2026. Six weeks later, the country turned 250, and 94 out of every 100 Democrats had already told Gallup that love of country didn’t make the cut among the three things America needs most.
Sources: Mediaite, “Patriotism Ranked as Top Value for Republicans, and Least Important for Dems, New Poll Reveals”; Washington Examiner, “Pride in being American reaches new low ahead of 250th anniversary”; TheBlaze, “American patriotism hits 25-year low as Democrats, Gen Z lead decline”; Gallup, “Sharply Fewer Democrats Say They’re Proud to Be Americans” (2017); HuffPost via AOL, “Shockingly Small Portion Of Democrats Are Proud To Be American, Poll Shows” (2025); Gallup and Aspen Ideas, American Values Index (2025); Fox 13, “Poll shows Americans’ confidence in US moral values continuing to decline”; Associated Press-NORC polling via Mediaite; National Archives, Declaration of Independence