A brand-new poll just caught the Democrat Party in a moment of raw, unfiltered honesty.
And the results are going to leave a lot of Americans shaking their heads heading into the nation’s 250th birthday.
Because when pollsters asked Democrats how they feel about the American flag compared to the Black Lives Matter flag, the answer was one nobody in the Democrat Party wanted to see in print.
According to a new YouGov survey, Democrats are more likely to give a thumbs up for displaying a Black Lives Matter flag than an American flag. The poll found 74% of Democrats have a very positive or somewhat positive view of the BLM flag, compared to 72% who feel the same way about the Stars and Stripes.
Two percentage points. That is the margin by which the flag of a political organization that openly declared its founders to be “trained Marxists” edges out the flag that men and women have bled and died to defend for 250 years.
Democrats are also twice as likely to have a negative or somewhat negative view of the American flag — at 10% — than the BLM flag, which came in at 5%.
Let that sink in. One in ten Democrats looks at the Stars and Stripes and feels negatively about it. But only half that many feel the same way about a flag tied to a movement whose founders described themselves as Marxists and whose national organization was later engulfed in a financial scandal over how millions in donated dollars were spent.
Republicans landed on the opposite end of the spectrum when it came to the BLM flag — only 10% of GOP voters said they had a positive or somewhat positive view of it.
And then there is the question of President Trump’s flag.
YouGov’s data also included how Democrats feel about a “Donald Trump flag,” which presumably includes a picture of the president’s image or a reference to his Make America Great Again movement. A whopping 88% of Democrats had a very negative or somewhat negative view of Trump flags.
So to summarize where the Democrat Party stands right now: the BLM flag gets warmer reviews than the American flag, and the flag associated with the sitting President of the United States — a man who just won a landslide election — gets near-universal hostility. That is not a fringe position inside the party. That is the party.
But the YouGov survey did not arrive in a vacuum. It landed right on top of another poll that told a very similar story.
YouGov’s poll was released right after a new Marist poll found less than half of Democrats are proud to be Americans. The NPR/PBS News/Marist poll surveyed 1,340 Americans and the results were stark.
In that poll, 45% of Democrat respondents said they are generally “very proud” or “proud” of being American. Fifty-five percent of Democrats said they are generally “not too proud” or “not proud at all.”
In contrast, 93% of Republican respondents said they are generally “very proud” or “proud” of being American.
That is not a gap. That is a chasm. And it has been widening fast.
A 2025 Gallup poll had the divide at 92-36, with Democrats crashing down from 62% proud citizens the year before when Joe Biden was in the White House; Republicans were at 85% on the pride scale back in 2024.
YouGov had similar results this year, where 96% of Republicans were proud citizens, compared to 58% of Democrats.
The trajectory here is not subtle. Democrat pride in America has been in freefall, and the floor keeps dropping. In a single year, Democrat pride collapsed by more than 20 points in the Gallup numbers. That is not a gradual drift. That is a deliberate turn away from the country itself.
And the timing could not be more telling. The Marist poll was released just days before America celebrates its 250th birthday. While the rest of the country was gearing up for fireworks, parades, and the largest national celebration in a generation, a majority of registered Democrats were telling pollsters they are not proud of the country throwing the party.
The Marist results also arrived as the Democrat Party appears to be going through some changes, with several socialist candidates winning primaries in recent weeks. The party is not moving toward the middle. The numbers suggest it is accelerating away from it — away from patriotism, away from the flag, and toward a politics built on grievance and identity rather than shared national pride.
BLM, for its part, is not a civil rights organization in any traditional sense. Its co-founders openly described themselves as “trained Marxists.” The national organization raised tens of millions of dollars after the summer of 2020 — the same summer when dozens of American cities burned, federal buildings were attacked, and a police precinct in Minneapolis was torched — and then faced serious questions about how that money was spent, including on a multimillion-dollar mansion purchased by one of its founders. The Democrat base gave that flag a warmer reception than the American one.
Republicans are not confused about any of this. Republicans are more than twice as likely to be proud Americans, with Marist finding 93% of right-wing respondents proud of their country. The America First movement has spent years arguing that the Left’s project is not reform but replacement — replacing American history with shame, replacing patriotism with identity politics, and replacing the shared symbols of the republic with the flags of political movements that openly reject the founding.
These polls do not prove a conspiracy. But they do show something real about where the Democrat Party has landed. When more than half your voters are not proud of the country and your base rates a Marxist-founded political organization’s flag above the Stars and Stripes, the party has a patriotism problem that no rebranding exercise is going to fix.
The 250th anniversary of the United States is a moment most Americans — and nearly all Republicans — are greeting with genuine pride. CNN contributor Lulu Garcia-Navarro acknowledged that “the Democratic Party writ large has stepped away from the rallying around the flag,” and said that if you see the flag displayed, “you are going to assume that that person is a Republican.”
That is a remarkable thing for a CNN contributor to admit out loud. And the polling backs her up completely.
The Democrat Party used to at least pretend to love this country. The flags they choose to honor — and the ones they choose to sneer at — say more about where they have ended up than any platform document ever could.
Sources: YouGov survey (conducted June 30-July 2, 2026, n=1,088); NPR/PBS News/Marist Poll (conducted June 8-11, 2026, n=1,340); Gallup American Pride Survey (2025); Mediaite; The Hill; Washington Times