In a new Pell Center poll, Americans say we’re founded on the ideals of the Declaration rather than the intrinsic character of the Anglo-Saxon people by 85-15, and for Republicans and Trump voters the gap is even wider
By Colin Woodard
Shortly before workers started constructing a cage fight venue on the White House lawn to celebrate his birthday, President Donald Trump welcomed Britain’s King Charles III to the United States for its 250th anniversary. So, naturally, his prepared remarks rejected the central tenants document Americans are celebrating, the Declaration of Independence, in favor of blood and soil nationalism.
“For nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was settled and forged by men, women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British,” Trump began. “Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride, and that’s what it is: glory, destiny, and pride.”
“The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance,” the president continued, as he clarified that this inheritance was genetic, not cultural. “Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true.
“We’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea, but the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776,” he added, following in the footsteps of Vice President J.D. Vance in making his rejection of a purely civic national identity explicit. Vance has said we’re a people, not an idea, and specifically those people descended from those who fought in the Civil War or for the conquest of indigenous America, including the Confederates who fought against the Declaration’s ideals.
This blood and soil ethnonatonalism is at the root of Trumpism and flows from a tradition that goes back two centuries, to an era when Southern slave lords argued we were a union of Anglo-Saxon ethnostates (a story I told in my 2020 book, Union.) But do significant numbers of Americans believe this today? We asked them to find out.
As part of the Pell Center’s national Voices of Value survey, we asked likely voters which statement of national origin they more agreed with, that we’re “built on the idea that everyone is born with the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” or “on the character of the Anglo-Saxon people, their distinct love of liberty and their sense of glory, destiny and pride.” For Anglo-Saxon supremacists, the results were not pretty.
Americans rejected Trump’s formulation by 85-15, a whopping 70-point margin. Republicans and Trump 2024 voters were even less enthusiastic, with both of these groups preferring the Declaration’s ideals-based formulation of our nationhood by 88-12. Indeed, the Anglo-Saxon origin thesis didn’t crack 25 percent support with any segment — whether based on gender, race, education, partisan affiliation, ideology, regional culture – save one: Black people, 30 percent of whom said it better reflected the nation’s origins than the Declaration did.
Indeed, the best showing for the Anglo-Saxon narrative was from the voting segments least likely to endorse such thinking: progressives, Democrats, people of color, and younger voters picked it over the Declaration at slightly higher levels than self-identified MAGAs, Republicans, whites and old people. The strongest block of all were people of color living in the Deep South, where the ideology of white Anglo Saxon ethnonationalism was developed in the Antebellum Era. It’s safe to presume that a large proportion of the people who endorsed Trump’s view of American origins aren’t saying that’s how it should be, but rather how they believe it is.
These findings offer further evidence that most Americans do in fact believe the United States is based on ideals, not bloodlines, as shown in Nationhood Lab’s April 2024 and August 2024 national polls, and in the rapid collapse of Trump’s support during this winter’s ICE surge. Nationhood Lab has developed and tested a core narrative frame for communicating a civic national narrative for the U.S., arguing for what the country’s purpose is, who belongs, where we came from and where we are going.
The Voices of Value survey was overseen by Pell Center Associate Director Katie Sonder and fielded by Embold Research May 4-12, 2026. It gathered responses from 2,034 likely voters in the United States, and had a modeled margin of error of 2.2 percent. Nationhood Lab, based at Salve Regina University’s Pell Center for International Relations and Public Policy, is an interdisciplinary research, writing, testing and dissemination project focused on counteracting the authoritarian threat to American democracy and the centrifugal forces