Americans split between pride and frustration ahead of 250th anniversary

Americans headed toward the nation’s 250th birthday with a split view of the country itself, as an AP-NORC poll found open-ended descriptions ranging from “great,” “prosperous” and “powerful” to “struggling,” “declining,” “corruption” and “unfairness.” In the one-word question posed to 2,596 U.S. adults, about two in 10 gave positive answers while many others chose language that pointed to distrust or anxiety.

AP grouped those responses into clusters and found that 18% fell into the greatness, prosperity and power category, 15% into freedom, and 10% into confusion or lostness. Republicans were much more likely than Democrats to use positive terms, while Democrats were more likely to describe the country in negative ones, a partisan divide that has become part of how Americans read the nation before its semiquincentennial.

The broader AP-NORC America 250 poll, fielded June 11 to 17 among 3,040 adults with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.8 percentage points, showed the same split running through attitudes about the American Dream. Only one-third of adults said it still holds true, half said it once held true but does not anymore, and 15% said it has never been true.

Even with that frustration, Americans still clustered around a familiar civic core. Nearly 9 in 10 said freedom of speech is important to America’s identity, 86% said the right to vote is important, 80% said freedom of religion matters and 57% said the right to keep and bear arms is important. Yet 46% said freedom of speech is under major threat, leaving one of the country’s defining principles wrapped up in the country’s deepest anxiety.

When Americans were asked what holds the country together, freedom or liberty led at 18%. When asked what tears it apart, answers again turned to politics, ideology, interests and values, a pattern that echoed a related June 2026 AP-NORC and AAPI Data poll in which one-third of AAPI adults said politics was the main divider.

The milestone itself lands on July 4, 2026, and the institutions built to shape it are already in motion. Congress created the U.S. Semiquincentennial Commission in 2016 to plan the anniversary, while President Donald Trump’s January 29, 2025 executive order created Task Force 250 to coordinate a grand celebration of American Independence. America250 has set a “350 for 250” goal to engage all 350 million Americans by the anniversary, but the polling suggests the public will arrive with pride, suspicion and competing versions of what the country is for.