A month after the confetti settled on America's 250th, Tunnl asked 3,066 U.S. adults, a nationally representative sample, just how proud they really are. We had them rate their pride across five identities: country, state, town, generation, and employer. Then we asked one open-ended question with no menu of options to pick from: What holds the country together right now, if anything? What came back wasn't one story of pride. It was several, and they don't all agree.
The 250th anniversary of American independence was built for a single story. The National Park Service alone is running commemorations at more than 400 sites, $30 million in preservation grants have gone out across 14 states, and and cities across the country have spent the year marking it their own way. For example, New York Harbor hosted Sail4th 250, an international tall ship parade on July 4th, while preservation work continued at sites like Bunker Hill Monument and Saratoga Battlefield asking Americans to look back at 1776 and feel something in common.
So what did they actually feel once the fireworks faded and the decorations were packed away?
When Americans rate their pride across five different personally held viewpoints their country doesn’t come out on top, their generation does. On a 10 point scale, averaging 6.9 out of 10, generation leads in positive perceptions and personal pride. Country comes in second at 6.6, followed closely by state (6.5) and town (6.4). Employer trails everything, at 4.8, the only identity in the study with a negative net score (more people rate it 0–3 than 8–10) and nearly two full points below the next-lowest score, town, at 6.4.
That gap matters more than it might look. Town and state pride are nearly as broad as national pride, 43–44% of Americans are "proud" (8–10) of their town or state, compared to 48% for the country, but they carry meaningfully less downside: 18% say they're not proud of their town or state, versus 21% for the country. Local pride is almost as warm as national pride, with a lower risk of turning someone off.
This tracks with what outside researchers have been finding for a while. Gallup's own tracking, running since 2001, put "extremely proud" Americans at just 33% in its June 2026 poll — a 25-year low, and down 8 points from a year earlier. Tunnl's insights, gathered a few weeks later using a different scale, tells a compatible story: national pride is real, but it's no longer the obvious front-runner it once was, and identities closer to home are winning on consistency, even if the country still wins on raw intensity.
Here's where the picture gets more interesting than "pride is declining." The country isn't just losing altitude on average; it's polarizing at the extremes. 27% of Americans give their country a perfect 10, higher than any other 10-spot-identity in the study. But 21% score it 0–3, also the highest downside of any identity measured.
Put another way: 32% of the country sits at one of the two extremes on national pride, a perfect 10 or a flat zero. And 65% express some pride in the country at all (a 6 or higher), the highest concentration of any identity Tunnl measured. Nothing else in the survey runs this hot at both ends at once.
Some of that heat traces back to how this anniversary itself has been run. Looking back at both anniversaries, PBS NewsHour found that 1976 leaned on grassroots, locally-driven history projects and reenactments, while 2026's official programming has leaned more on top-down, presidential-branded moments that read as partisan to a chunk of the country before they ever get to the history itself. Tunnl's own data shows the same fault line from a different angle: the single highest pride reading anywhere in the survey, 61%, belongs to Republicans.
None of this means national pride is disappearing. It means it behaves less like a shared national mood and more like a segment strategy: real and unevenly distributed. A campaign built to broadcast high-intensity patriotism to everyone will resonate deeply with part of the country and alienate another part of it in roughly the same motion.
When Tunnl asked Americans “what holds the country together right now”, the single most common answer, 30% of respondents, was some version of "the people." Not the Constitution. Not any branch of government. Not a political party. Verbatim responses ranged from "the people of the United States" to the simpler "everyday people."
Institutions did not come close. The Constitution, the courts, and government combined accounted for under 7% of responses. That's a strikingly small share for a document and a system of government that most civic messaging still treats as the default answer to "what makes America, America." It also lines up with a much larger body of research on institutional trust: Pew Research Center's tracking, running since 1958, found that only 17% of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing "just about always" or "most of the time" as of last fall. This was one of the lowest readings in nearly seven decades of asking, down from 73% when the question was first posed. If institutions have lost that much credibility over sixty-plus years, it's not surprising that they barely show up when people are asked, with no prompts, what's holding the country together.
Two of the next most common answers: 13% said 'a party or leader,' and 13% said 'nothing.' The rest skewed warmer with 'shared values' and 'kindness, helping others' each drew 11%, and religion drew 7%.
Tunnl's own data points to a five-rule playbook:
1.) Go local before you go national. Town and state pride carry nearly the same warmth as national pride, with far less risk of turning someone off.
2.) Lead with people, not symbols. "The people" outperforms every institution combined as what Americans credit for holding the country together, so ordinary Americans doing ordinary things will land harder than an eagle or a flag.
3.) Do not claim unity as an accomplished fact. A fifth of the country says nothing holds it together, and to them, an assertion of unity reads as inaccurate, not inspiring.
4.) Treat flag-waving as a targeting decision, not a tone decision. High-intensity patriotism is a real, valuable segment, but broadcast to everyone, it divides as often as it unites.
5.) Fix the one pride score a brand actually controls: its own employees. Employer pride is the only identity in the study with a negative net score, and unlike national mood, it doesn't require political permission to move.
What's above is the top-line story. Tunnl's full deck goes deeper: pride ratings across all five identities, the open-ended theme breakdown, and the five-point campaign playbook for brands, advocacy groups, and agencies figuring out what "American" means to a country that agrees on very little.