A majority of young voters in the United States want a socialist to win the 2028 presidential election, and more than three-quarters want government to nationalize major U.S. industries, a new poll from The Heartland Institute and Rasmussen Reports has found.
In the survey, “53% of likely voters aged 18-39 said they would ‘like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election,’ and 76% said they ‘somewhat’ or ‘strongly’ agree that ‘Major Industries like health care, energy, and big tech should be nationalized to give more control and equity to the people,’” write Justin Haskins and Christopher Talgo in a Heartland press release about the results.
The poll numbers suggest that “increasingly more young American voters favor radical socialist policies,” Haskins and Talgo write. The clamor for a potential socialist president crosses party lines, the poll found, with “a shocking 35% of respondents who said they voted for Donald Trump in 2024.”
Perhaps even more troubling is that two-thirds of likely voters in this age group said they think the United States is “morally mixed” or “fundamentally evil.”
The survey included 1,201 likely voters aged 18-39 and was completed on August 27, 2025. The reported sampling error is +/- 3 percentage points with a 95 percent confidence level.
Young Americans’ belief in the United States and market economies are deteriorating in the wake of long-term economic decline, says Haskins, a vice president at The Heartland Institute. “This survey clearly shows that due largely to economic challenges, young Americans are increasingly turning to socialist candidates and radical collectivist policies,” said Haskins, the primary author of the poll. “The fact that three-quarters of voters aged 18-39 support nationalizing major industries is an incredibly disturbing trend that must be taken seriously. Clearly, socialism is once again on the rise in the United States.”
The 53 percent who said they would like to see a democratic socialist candidate win the 2028 presidential election most commonly cited high housing costs (31 percent), the economy unfairly benefiting older, wealthier Americans (17 percent) or large corporations (15 percent), and taxes too low on corporations (12 percent) or the wealthy (11 percent). Eight percent said their biggest reason for supporting a socialist is to establish a single-payer health care system like those in Europe and Canada.
This is dismaying but inevitable. Government interference in the nation’s economy over the past century, especially the establishment of a federal welfare state in the mid-1960s and the full severing of the U.S. dollar from gold in 1971, has distorted Americans’ production and trading of goods and services for decades. The disturbance of the relationship between work and rewards has become more pronounced for each generation.
Blaming free markets and looking to socialism as the solution gets the situation entirely wrong. The United States does not have anything like true free markets today, and the nation has not had a true market economy for decades.
New York University economics professor Thomas Philippon argues in his book The Great Reversal: How America Gave Up on Free Markets (2019), “US markets have become less competitive: concentration is high in many industries, leaders are entrenched, and their profit rates are excessive. Second, this lack of competition has hurt US consumers and workers: it has led to higher prices, lower investment and lower productivity growth. Third, and contrary to common wisdom, the main explanation is political, not technological: I have traced the decrease in competition to increasing barriers to entry and weak antitrust enforcement, sustained by heavy lobbying and campaign contributions.”
The pandemic years and Biden administration spending spree and regulatory strangulation undermined market freedom even further.
These trends have made it increasingly difficult for young people to get established in the economy. The rising generation is reacting not against the results of free markets -- which we do not have. Though they do not know it, the cause of their woes and complaints is the inevitable destruction inflicted by crony capitalism, corporatism, and government manipulation of the dollar.
That is what these young people are reacting against, and their claimed support for socialism reflects the only alternative they have been taught in their schools and in the nation’s culture: more government.
These poll results show that it is critical for all proponents of liberty and market freedom to declare that the current U.S. economy is anything but free and that socialism is the problem, not the answer.
S. T. Karnick (https://stkarnick.substack.com/) is a senior fellow at The Heartland Institute and author of the Life, Liberty, Property weekly e-newsletter.
Image: Heartland Institute