Generation May Influence Americans’ Politics More Than Race Or Sex, Poll Finds
'important to my generation'
Shock poll: America’s youth want socialism on autopilot — literally
Growing up during the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union, I remember when socialism was a universal punch line. It stood for failure, repression, and economic ruin.
Not any more. Today, socialism is the ideological spearpoint of the left. Many young Americans now insist that socialism is the cure for the affordability crisis squeezing them. They believe it with a fervor that would have stunned earlier generations.
The evidence is overwhelming, and the verdict is final: Socialism fails everywhere it is tried. Now imagine that system fused with an all-seeing AI.
New polling from Rasmussen Reports and the Heartland Institute’s Emerging Issues Center shows that a majority of likely voters ages 18 to 39 want a Democratic Socialist to win the White House in 2028.
Nearly 60% of young Americans say they support more government housing, a nationwide rent freeze, and government-run grocery stores in every town.
These numbers aren’t anomalies. They reflect a deeper reality: Many young Americans know little about socialism’s actual history, consequences, or track record — and they have been conditioned to believe it can fix the challenges in front of them.
One reason for that ignorance is uncomfortable but obvious. It’s not only the schools — it’s the parents. According to the polls, parents were the most influential voices shaping their children’s support for Democratic Socialism. More than half of respondents said their parents held a favorable view of it.
That alone explains a great deal. And unsurprisingly, more than half also said teachers and professors viewed Democratic Socialism favorably. After decades of ideological drift, even parents who grew up after the USSR’s collapse now believe socialism “might work.”
Based on my own experience teaching in public schools, that rings true. Most of my colleagues openly sympathized with the socialist cause and were hostile to free-market capitalism.
This didn’t happen by accident. It reflects a long march beginning in the Progressive Era. My own postgraduate experience at a prestigious teaching college felt less like preparation for the classroom and more like a Cultural Revolution struggle session — conformity required, dissent punished.
As the public education system drifted leftward, it taught generation after generation that socialism is benevolent and capitalism is predatory. The result is predictable. Many young people now see the free market as the enemy, not the mechanism that lifted billions out of poverty. Cronyism and the explosion of government power only blur the picture further.
Layer onto this the collapse of basic literacy and numeracy. When students can’t read well, struggle with math, and can’t write a coherent paragraph, they are more vulnerable to ideological manipulation — and more likely to lean on machines to think for them.
So it shouldn’t shock anyone that almost half of young Americans surveyed want an advanced AI system to create society’s laws, rules, and regulations. Nearly 40% want that AI system to determine human rights and control the world’s most powerful militaries.
RELATED: Almost half of Gen Z wants AI to run the government. You should be terrified.
How did this happen? Watch how many parents are glued to screens, outsourcing daily life to devices. Is it any wonder their children grow up thinking technology is omnipotent?
Parents should start with something simple: a family movie night featuring the "Terminator" franchise. Let the kids see where blind faith in machines tends to lead.
Better yet, teach them the truth about socialism. Teach them what it does to human beings. Share the books, documentaries, and testimonies exposing socialism’s century of famine, repression, forced labor, and mass murder — horrors still unfolding in Cuba and North Korea.
The evidence is overwhelming, and the verdict is final: socialism fails everywhere it is tried. Now imagine that system fused with an all-seeing AI — a surveillance state that Stalin could only dream of. The thought of an AI-run socialist regime is not dystopian fiction. It is what many young Americans say they want.
They should be careful what they wish for.
Liberals' twisted views on Charlie Kirk assassination, censorship captured by a damning poll
It has long been abundantly clear that there is a strong appetite for political violence and ideological uniformity on the left. A new Young America's Foundation poll released on Tuesday indicated that this is indeed an intergenerational problem.
Shortly after the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk, Echelon Insights conducted a YAF survey of 1,021 registered voters ages 18-29 nationwide.
On the topic of Kirk's murder on Sept. 10, respondents were asked which of the following two statements they agreed with more: "There is absolutely no justification for murdering someone over their viewpoints" or "Kirk's viewpoints mean he brought this violence upon himself to an extent."
Seventy percent of respondents answered that there was no justification for murdering a person over his views. While 90% of conservatives and 75% of moderates answered that there was no justification, 42% of self-described liberal respondents suggested that Kirk had it coming.
'Three in ten young voters, however, say violence might be justified in some instances to shut those types of speech down.'
Young liberals' responses to a follow-up question helped clarify that a great many just don't want conservatives to be able to articulate their views in public.
When asked whether they believed "we are better off when strongly conservative viewpoints are able to be voiced and shared in the public square," 53% of liberals said conservative viewpoints should be "shut down or kept out of the public square."
RELATED: Blue cities reject law, reject order — and reject America
Only 49% of all respondents supported expressions of conservative viewpoints in public. The statement lacked majority support in part because only 75% of conservatives indicated that society was better off when their viewpoints were not shut down in public.
Although young liberals majoritively favor censorship, YAF noted that a significant percentage of all respondents are far from absolute in their support for free speech.
"Fewer than half of young voters think that negative statements toward racial or ethnic groups or celebrating acts of violence should be protected as free speech — 42% and 48% respectively — and roughly 60% believe such expression should be reportable to employers," noted YAF spokesman Spencer Brown. "Three in ten young voters, however, say violence might be justified in some instances to shut those types of speech down."
Other polls in recent months and years have similarly highlighted the violent and censorious mentality that possesses so many on the left.
A Marist Poll conducted in late September found that 10% of Democrats strongly agreed and another 18% agreed with the statement that "Americans may have to resort to violence in order to get the country back on track."
A survey conducted by the Network Contagion Research Institute and Rutgers University's Social Perception Lab revealed in April that 55% of respondents who identified as left of center said that assassinating Trump would be at least somewhat justified.
RMG Research asked American adults in the wake of the September 2024 attempt on President Donald Trump's life whether the country would "be better off if Donald Trump had been killed last weekend?" While 69% of respondents said no, 28% of Democrats answered "yes."
The desire on the left to see consequence visited upon those who refuse to ideologically fall in line was also manifested during the pandemic, when a poll found that 45% of Democrats strongly or somewhat favored "having federal or state governments require that citizens temporarily live in designated facilities or locations if they refuse to get a COVID-19 vaccine."
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Poll provides clear idea of who's poised to sweep 2028 Republican presidential primary
Those keen to wrest control of the GOP from MAGA conservatives and to resume the course charted by the party prior to President Donald Trump's 2016 election have their work cut out for them.
A new poll conducted by the Saint Anselm College Survey Center at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics revealed that Vice President JD Vance presently towers over his potential 2028 GOP primary opponents — including Calgary-born Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, who is poised to run as the kind of George W. Bush-era Republican that Trump crushed in the 2016 and 2024 primaries.
'Voters will sniff out anybody who has seemed to be sort of focused on themselves.'
When asked whom they would vote for if the election were held this month, 57% of respondents said that they would support Vance; 9% said Secretary of State Marco Rubio; 7% said Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis; 4% said Ohio gubernatorial candidate Vivek Ramaswamy; 4% said former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Nimarata "Nikki" Haley; 4% said Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard; 1% said Ted Cruz; and 1% said Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin.
Two percent of respondents signaled they would vote for someone else, and 10% said they were unsure.
Sources close to the Trump administration recently told Politico that Rubio has telegraphed that he would support Vance if he chooses to run.
One source close to the White House noted that the "expectation is JD as [nominee] and Rubio as VP."
RELATED: The early social media reviews of Cruz's 2028 POTUS trial balloon are in
DeSantis, who secured less than 2% of the votes cast in the 2024 Republican primary before dropping out, recently told CNN's Jake Tapper, "I'm not thinking about anything because I think we have a president now who’s not even been in for a year. We've got a lot that we've got to accomplish."
The Florida governor may have taken the advice that James Blair, a former DeSantis staffer who now serves as Trump's White House deputy chief of staff, recently shared via Politico: "If you're a Republican that wants to run in 2028 right now, you need to focus on keeping Republicans in power for 2026. I think the number one thing everybody can do is focus on the team and helping their team and not focus on themselves."
"Voters will sniff out anybody who has seemed to be sort of focused on themselves," added Blair.
Last month, the University of New Hampshire's Granite State Poll found that while DeSantis didn't place in the top five Republican presidential primary candidates for 2028, he managed the fourth-highest favorability rating.
Vance placed first with a favorability rating among likely Republican primary voters of 77%; Rubio placed second with a 58% rating; Gabbard placed third with a 57% rating; DeSantis came fourth with a 56% rating; and Ramaswamy came fifth with 46%.
Cruz and Haley, meanwhile, were much further down the list with favorability ratings of 38% and 25%, respectively.
Gabbard, polling ahead of Cruz in the Saint Anselm College poll, has not made explicit any intention to run but indicated earlier this year on "The Megyn Kelly Show" that she "will never rule out any opportunity" to serve her country.
On the prediction website Polymarket, Vance is given a 55% chance of winning the primary.
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'Something has gone terribly wrong': Marriage is in 'disastrous' decline — perhaps because of women
The marriage rate has been in decline for decades, dropping from 10.6 per 1,000 people in 1980 to 6.1 in 2023. Last year, American adults were less likely to be married than at nearly any other time since the Census Bureau began logging marital status in 1940, with married couples heading only 47.1% of U.S. households.
The apparent aversion to marriage is bad news for American children, who perform better in school and are far less likely to end up in prison or depressed when raised by married parents, as well as for American adults who tend to see better health outcomes, be happier, and live longer when espoused.
'Devaluing marriage and motherhood has consequences.'
Recent Pew Research Center analysis of survey data from the University of Michigan suggests that this decline may continue — especially if young women's growing resistance to marriage goes unremedied.
Whereas 20 years prior, 80% of 12th graders said that they were most likely to choose marriage in the long run, only 67% of 12th graders polled in 2023 indicated that they want to get married someday. Another 24% said they don't know if they'll get married, up from 16% in 1993.
This drop appears to have been largely driven by shifting views among girls.
In 1993, 83% of girls and 76% of boys said that they wanted to get married. In 2023, only 61% of girls said they wanted to get married — a drop of 22% — while 74% of boys indicated they wanted to ultimately tie the knot.
RELATED: Family or fallout — experts assess the threats now facing the nuclear family
Pew indicated that there was also a precipitous drop in the percentage of 12th graders who indicated they wanted to have kids if they marry.
Whereas in 1993, 82% said they wanted to have kids, in 2023, only 73% indicated they wanted to welcome new life into this world. Even more dramatically, the percentage of those who said they would "very likely" want to have kids if married dropped from 64% in 1993 to 48% in 2023.
"It's almost like decades of devaluing marriage and motherhood has consequences," wrote the Alabama Policy Institute.
Katy Faust, founder of the children's advocacy group Them Before Us, stated, "More than almost anything else trending, this terrifies me. Because of the nature of our bodies women have historically pursued marriage more. What kind of disastrous, antihuman messaging are young women being flooded with to return these kinds of results?"
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Dr. Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, said the anti-nuptial trend among young women and adolescent girls was "disastrous."
Wilcox underscored that this trend reflects a particularly raw deal for women, highlighting a recent YouGov survey of U.S. women, ages 25 to 55, fielded by the Institute for Family Studies and the Wheatley Institute, which found that married women with children are:
- more likely (19%) to report being "very happy" than both unmarried women with children (13%) and unmarried women without children (10%);
- more likely (47%) to report that life has felt enjoyable most or all of the time in the past 30 days than both unmarried women with children (40%) and unmarried women without children (34%);
- less likely (11%) to report being lonely most or all of the time in the past 30 days than both unmarried women with children (23%) and unmarried women without children (20%);
- more likely (51%) to receive physical affection than both unmarried women with children (29%) and unmarried women without children (17%); and
- more likely (28%) to report their lives have a clear sense of purpose than both unmarried women with children (25%) and unmarried women without children (16%).
Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet said of the Pew report, "Something has gone terribly wrong."
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