More than half of Americans (55 percent) rank the Fourth of July as one of the nation’s “most important holidays” while six percent view it as one of the least important, a Rasmussen Reports survey found.
The percentage of Americans who highly rank the holiday is up from 53 percent last year. Thirty-six percent say the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 is “somewhere in between.”
“Over the years, Americans have consistently ranked the Fourth of July second only to Christmas as the nation’s most important holiday,” according to the survey report.
However, only a little over a third of American adults (34 percent) believe the Founding Fathers “would consider the United States a success,” up from 27 percent last year.
“Forty percent (40 percent) now say the Founding Fathers – George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, among others – would view America as a failure, down from 53 percent last year. Twenty-six percent (26 percent) are undecided,” the survey found.
Democrats (42 percent) are more likely than Republicans (29 percent) and unaffiliated voters (31 percent) to believe the Founding Fathers would view present-day United States a success.
Those percentages are a “reversal from partisan attitudes in 2017, when President Donald Trump was in office,” when more Republicans (46 percent) than Democrats (31 percent) believed the Founding Fathers would look favorably on the nation, the survey found.
Even so, Republicans (69 percent) are more likely than Democrats (44 percent) and unaffiliated voters (55 percent) to say the Fourth of July is one of the nation’s most important holidays.
When broken down by age group, adults under 40, especially younger women, are less likely than older Americans to think Independence Day is one of America’s top holidays. In contrast, married adults are much more likely than unmarried adults to highly rank the holiday.
Rasmussen Reports conducted the survey with 1,153 American adults between June 25-27. The margin of sampling error is ±3 percent at the 95 percent confidence level.
