Zoomers Will Decide the 2028 Election, and Neither Political Party Is the Answer

Housing, Food, and the Decentralized Alternative

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Robert W. Malone, MD, MS, and Jill Glasspool Malone, PhD

By 2028, millennials and Gen Z, otherwise known as Zoomers, together will make up more than half of American voters. Gen Z, born between 1997 and 2012, has changed its voting more sharply than any other age group over the last two years. In 2024, many young voters backed Donald Trump. Pollster Rich Baris finds that the president’s approval among voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine has since fallen by nearly thirty-three points. No other age group has moved as far (Baris 2026). By his tracking, the decline began as the administration shifted its attention from domestic concerns toward the Iranian war. In 2025, young New Yorkers helped elect Zohran Mamdani, a self-described “democratic socialist”, as mayor.

Trump and Mamdani would seem to have very little in common. Yet the young voters drawn to them may have been responding to the same underlying dissatisfaction: a political and economic order they no longer believe works for them. Their allegiance is not necessarily ideological, and it certainly is not settled. They appear willing to move across the political spectrum in search of something that breaks with the institutions, orthodoxies, and concentrations of power they have inherited.

There is, however, another tradition that neither party has seriously offered them. It is neither socialism nor the increasingly centralized marriage of government and corporate power. It has a long intellectual pedigree and a substantial history in practice. Its organizing principle is deceptively simple: economic and civic decision-making authority should reside as close as practicable to the people who must live with the consequences of decisions made.

Two Test Cases: Housing and Food

Housing is where the generational divide becomes difficult to ignore. The National Association of Realtors reports that first-time buyers made up just 21 percent of home purchases in its 2025 survey, the lowest share since tracking began in 1981. Repeat buyers had a median age of sixty-two, and nearly a third paid cash. The National Association of Realtors puts the median first-time buyer at forty years old. Mortgage lenders place it in the early thirties. Either way, a buyer in their twenties is competing against older buyers carrying decades of accumulated equity.

In food, the imbalance appears in the dwindling bargaining power of farmers and ranchers. Four companies account for about 85 percent of steer and heifer purchases in the United States. A young rancher raising cattle therefore faces a highly concentrated market with few potential buyers, while federal law constrains many of the alternatives. Yes, this is more regulatory capture by industry of the federal government, but that is a story for another essay.

Republicans and Democrats prescribe different remedies for both problems. Yet beneath those differences lies a common premise: authority should remain with institutions and officials rather than with the people who must live with the consequences of their decisions.

The Democratic Response: the City Becomes Landlord and Grocer

Mamdani is the Democratic Party’s most prominent answer to young voters. In June, his Rent Guidelines Board voted seven to one to freeze rents on roughly one million NYC apartments. In July, he announced five city-owned grocery stores that will sell produce, meat, and pantry staples at a 30 percent discount.

Obviously, rent control doesn’t work. The most detailed recent study of rent control examined San Francisco’s 1994 expansion. Landlords covered by the new rules reduced their rental supply by fifteen percent, largely by converting buildings to condominiums and owner-occupied housing. The resulting contraction drove up rents elsewhere in the city. Existing tenants in regulated units benefited. Those who came later, many of them young, encountered a much smaller and much more expensive rental market. Rent control may work in the short term to corner votes, but in the long run, it is a failure.

The grocery plan presents another problem: other businesses and taxpayers must absorb the cost of that 30 percent discount. In August, a coalition of small, minority-owned supermarkets and bodegas sued the city to stop the plan. Their objection is straightforward. City stores will pay neither rent nor utilities, while the family-run shop down the block pays both, as well as taxes. Kansas City opened a taxpayer-funded supermarket and closed it in early 2025, while Chicago abandoned a similar proposal as impractical. The Soviet Union’s government-run food system became notorious for chronic shortages, limited selection, and long lines for basic goods.

Both of Mamdani’s policies operate at the local level, giving them the appearance of community control. But local government is not the same thing as local autonomy. In both instances, municipal authorities assume greater control over decisions ordinarily made by tenants, property owners, shoppers, and grocers. The scale may be municipal, but the governing instinct is familiar: replace individual choices with government ones, the defining logic of a command economy. The final result will predictably be disaster.

The Republican Response: Rules That Favor Incumbents

Republicans describe themselves as the party of free markets. Yet in heavily regulated industries, which is to say pretty much all major economic activity, the existing rules often work to the advantage of the largest firms.

Beef offers a particularly clear example. Under federal meat inspection law, a farmer can have an animal butchered at a small custom shop, but meat processed under the custom exemption cannot be sold commercially. The PRIME Act would allow states to permit certain intrastate sales from custom slaughter facilities. Members of both parties have introduced versions of it repeatedly since 2015, but Congress has never enacted it.

In August, President Trump called the concentrated processing industry a “nasty monopoly” and promised to give farmers and ranchers greater freedom to process their own food. On September 4, he followed with an executive order directing USDA to reduce unnecessary processing barriers and expand market access for smaller producers. But an executive order cannot rewrite the Federal Meat Inspection Act, leaving the fundamental statutory restriction in Congress’s hands. So, in effect, the executive order is all words, no action. Good for a midterm election quote, but not much more.

There is a broader problem here with Trump’s reliance on executive orders, in both his first and second administrations. An executive order can create the appearance of decisive action while leaving the underlying law untouched. Trump employed this device repeatedly during his first term, sometimes directing agencies to study, review, or reconsider a problem without changing the statute that created it. He has relied even more heavily on executive action in his second term. The political advantage is obvious: the president can announce that he has acted, supporters can point to a signed order, and the constituency demanding change receives something tangible. But when the obstacle is embedded in federal law, Trump’s executive orders are meaningless. Congress still has to change the law. And executive orders are readily rescinded when administrations change.

This exposes an uncomfortable contradiction in Republican free-market rhetoric. Regulations that impose costs on large corporations are frequent targets for repeal. Regulations that insulate those same corporations from smaller competitors usually prove remarkably durable. Economists have various names for this entanglement of private economic power and government protection, including crony capitalism and corporatism. Whatever the terminology, the result is the same: established firms acquire advantages through public policy that they would have to fight much harder to preserve in an open market.

The Old Problem of a Government-Created Monopoly

The founders knew the dangers of government-conferred economic privilege because they had lived under it. Parliament’s Tea Act of 1773 gave the British East India Company a favored position in the colonial tea trade. That December, colonists were so pissed off about this unfair advantage that they dumped the company’s tea into Boston Harbor. At the Constitutional Convention in 1787, delegates rejected a proposal to give Congress the power to grant corporate charters, with monopoly power among the concerns raised in the debate.

Modern versions of this arrangement can be found in industries that bear directly on the lives of young Americans. In food, the beef concentration and inspection rules described above protect an already consolidated market - favoring foreign companies. In health care, thirty-five states and the District of Columbia require hospitals or clinics to obtain state permission, known as a certificate of need, before opening or expanding certain facilities or services. Existing providers can often challenge a prospective competitor’s application - another huge barrier to entry.

Technology presents a newer version of the same problem. OpenAI has endorsed the FRONTIER Act, a bipartisan bill introduced in July that would establish the first federal regulatory framework for frontier AI models. The largest technology companies can absorb the lawyers, compliance departments, reporting requirements, and other costs that come with an elaborate regulatory regime. A small developer cannot.

That distinction matters because open-weight models have dramatically lowered the cost of entering the AI field. A young programmer can download a model, modify it, build a product around it, and potentially compete without first obtaining permission from one of the dominant companies. Rules intended to govern the largest AI companies can therefore have a very different effect on the smallest: they can determine whether the next generation of competitors ever gets through the door.

What the Two Political Parties Share

The parties disagree bitterly on many issues, but they have remarkably similar instincts when the rules protect their own hold on power.

The Cook Political Report rates 366 of 435 House seats as solid, meaning neither party expects them to be competitive. In roughly five districts out of six, the people who drew the map settled the general election in advance. Each party condemns the other’s gerrymanders, and neither has passed a law ending the practice. Between them, the two parties divide up congressional representation the way a cartel divides a market.

Washington anticipated the danger. In his Farewell Address, he warned that the “spirit of party” could become a vehicle through which ambitious men subvert the power of the people. The Constitution he helped create does not mention political parties at all.

Nor are today’s two dominant parties ancient fixtures of the Republic. The Democratic Party emerged around Andrew Jackson’s election in 1828; the Republican Party was founded in 1854, nearly seven decades after the Constitutional Convention. Yet today, the two parties exercise a degree of control over Congress that the Constitution neither created nor contemplated.

A Third Approach: Who Gets to Decide?

In 1945, foundational Austrian School economist Friedrich Hayek published “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” The Austrian School begins from a proposition that seems obvious but has profound political consequences: no central authority can possess the dispersed knowledge held by millions of individuals making decisions every day. A farmer knows which field floods. A shopkeeper knows what stopped selling last week. A contractor knows which material has suddenly become scarce. Prices transmit fragments of that knowledge without requiring anyone to understand the whole system. The central planner, by contrast, works from information that arrives late, condensed into reports and filtered through layers of bureaucracy. Dispersed knowledge is one of the foundations of a free market. Centrally planned economies, no matter what pretty terms are used to put lipstick on them, are the opposite.

Another intellectual tradition reaches much the same conclusion from a different direction. Subsidiarity holds that decisions should remain with individuals, families, communities and local institutions unless there is a compelling reason to move them upward. Pope Pius XI gave the principle its modern formulation in 1931: a larger authority should not assume functions that a smaller association can adequately perform for itself. Higher authority has a legitimate role when the smaller institution cannot do the job, but its purpose is to assist rather than replace it.

Together, these traditions establish a useful presumption: economic and political power should remain close to the people unless there is a demonstrable reason to move it farther away. When authority does move upward, the institution exercising that power should also bear responsibility for its cost. Otherwise government acquires the power to make decisions while sending someone else the bill. Sound familiar?

Applied to housing, this principle points first toward zoning. Local boards routinely restrict what property owners may build, often at the insistence of existing homeowners who benefit from limiting new construction. The people who bear much of the cost are prospective residents who cannot vote in that jurisdiction because they do not yet live there. Returning more of the building decision to the owner of the property addresses the restriction at its source rather than attempting to repair the resulting shortage with rent controls.

Food provides an even cleaner example. Wyoming’s Food Freedom Act of 2015 allows producers to sell most homemade foods directly to informed consumers without a state license (Wyoming Legislature 2015). The law does not create a government program to help small producers compete. It removes government from transactions in which adults are capable of deciding for themselves what they want to produce, sell, and eat. That is subsidiarity in its simplest form: when people can make the decision themselves, government has no reason to make it for them.

The same contest over authority is now playing out in technology and surveillance. In an Annenberg survey fielded this summer, 70 percent of adults under thirty opposed a new data center in their area, the highest opposition of any age group. In a YouGov survey of more than twenty thousand adults in August, more Americans opposed automated license plate readers in their communities than supported them.

For now, some of those decisions are still being made close to the people who live with them. Local opposition has blocked or delayed billions of dollars in data center projects, largely through county and municipal land-use decisions. Town and city councils from Texas to Lynchburg, Virginia, have ended contracts with Flock Safety, a leading vendor of automated license plate cameras. The people who live beside the server farm or drive beneath the camera still have some power to say no.

That authority is already being contested. In 2025, West Virginia, with the backing of its Republican governor, barred counties and municipalities from regulating data centers. The Trump administration has directed federal agencies to accelerate data center construction and instructed the Commerce Department to challenge state AI laws it considers unlawful. The bipartisan FRONTIER Act would establish AI rules at the national level. Together with colleagues and collaborators, Jill and I articulated a different principle in the Declaration of the Rights of Persons, published July 4 of this year: technologies may change, but the presumption of human agency should not.

None of this is foreign to the American constitutional tradition. Madison wrote in Federalist 45 that the powers delegated to the federal government would be “few and defined,” while those retained by the states would be “numerous and indefinite.” American federalism thus supplies the constitutional counterpart to the economic argument made by Hayek and the social principle of subsidiarity. They arose from different traditions and addressed different problems, but each placed limits on the concentration of authority. The farther power moves from the people who must live with its consequences, the greater the justification for moving it should have to be.

Where Gen Z Is Heading

Several surveys suggest that parts of this generation are moving toward self-reliance and traditional institutions. Gallup finds that 42 percent of men aged eighteen to twenty-nine now call religion very important in their lives, up from 28 percent in 2022 and 2023 (Gallup 2026). Nearly half of the four thousand respondents to a 2023 Homesteaders of America survey were under thirty-nine (Homesteaders of America 2023). Jill and I wrote Homesteading for Health for readers building that kind of household.

But this movement is not uniform, and the division between young men and women is particularly striking. Among women aged eighteen to twenty-nine, 29 percent call religion very important, a record low (Gallup 2026). Twelfth-grade girls are also less likely than boys to say they expect to marry, 61 percent compared with 74 percent (Pew Research Center 2025).

Those differences matter, but they should not obscure the more consequential political question. Young men and women do not have to want the same lives in order to insist upon the same promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” The young man who wants land, a family, and greater independence and the young woman who wants a career, a family, or some combination of the two share the same fundamental interest: the freedom to construct those lives themselves, rather than having their choices progressively narrowed by (often predatory) institutions they neither chose nor control.

That may also explain something that otherwise looks contradictory about this generation. In Rich Baris’ recent article in Real Clear Politics, he argues that the young voters who moved toward Trump in 2024 were not becoming conventional conservatives. They wanted to overturn a political and economic order they believe has failed them, an impulse he summarizes as “Burn It Down.”

Now some of those same voters are moving toward democratic socialism. The direction has changed, but the appetite for disruption has not. They are looking for a way out of a system they believe has made homes unaffordable, concentrated economic power, diminished their independence, and left institutions increasingly remote from the people they govern. The danger is that they may mistake transferring still more power to government for dismantling the system that failed them. If the grievance is loss of control over their own lives, replacing corporate and bureaucratic power with even greater state power does not solve the problem. It only changes who holds the power.

Kennedy, MAHA, and Gen Z

Baris’s numbers measure what has happened between young voters and Trump. Polling on Kennedy and MAHA is thinner, but what exists is revealing. In an April 2025 YouGov poll, 39 percent of voters aged eighteen to twenty-nine viewed Kennedy favorably, while only 22 percent viewed him very unfavorably, half the rate among voters sixty-five and older (YouGov 2025). An NBC News survey of more than nineteen thousand adults found younger adults more likely than older Americans to blame the food industry, rather than individual choices, for poor health. Their attitudes toward vaccines are less clear. Younger Americans have not broadly rejected vaccination, but polling has not been done to establish whether they do or don’t support mRNA vaccines specifically.

That distinction matters. Young voters do not have to agree with every MAHA position to be drawn to its challenge to the status quo. Concerns about food quality, chronic disease, corporate concentration, environmental exposures, medical autonomy, and the influence of industry over government all speak to the same dissatisfaction Baris found among young Trump voters. They believe powerful institutions are making decisions that affect their lives without adequately representing their interests. The appeal of MAHA, like the appeal of MAGA in 2024, may therefore be less about ideology than about the promise to challenge those institutions and return some measure of control to the individual.

We know that Trump’s downward spiral with young voters came because of the Iranian war, which also led to an inflationary trend. That creates a problem for Kennedy as well as Trump. In February, Kennedy defended the president’s executive order supporting glyphosate, provoking open opposition from within the MAHA coalition. Federal vaccine policy, including decisions involving mRNA vaccines, has meanwhile stalled, shifted and at times contradicted itself. Often it is based on proposals and executive orders, rather than real change. Once again, lipstick, and Gen Z, having been raised on unfulfilled promises, has developed a sophisticated sensitivity to such ploys. Whether these issues have changed Kennedy’s standing among young voters has not yet been measured.

But Baris’s findings suggest a warning that extends beyond Trump: a generation willing to abandon one political home in search of disruption is unlikely to grant permanent loyalty to another. If MAHA Corp and MAHA.gov keep reaching accommodation after accommodation with the institutions they were supposedly created to challenge, young voters may simply keep looking.

What Comes After “Burn It Down”?

Gen Z has already demonstrated that its political allegiance is conditional. Many young voters backed Trump not because they had become conventional Republicans, but because they wanted to disrupt institutions that had failed them. Some are now looking toward democratic socialism for much the same reason. The ideology has flip-flopped. The impulse to burn it all down has not.

That impulse should not be dismissed. A generation priced out of housing, entering markets dominated by enormous corporations, living under expanding surveillance, and watching decisions about war, technology, food, health, and money migrate toward institutions increasingly beyond its control has reasons to demand fundamental change. The mistake may lie not in wanting to tear down an arrangement that no longer serves them, but in believing that concentrating still more power in government will accomplish it.

The alternative to both Socialism and Corporatism is hardly new. The Austrian School of economics made the intellectual case for the free market: economic decisions dispersed among millions of people, coordinated through prices and voluntary exchange rather than dictated by central planners. The older tradition upon which the American experiment was founded, of individual liberty and limited government, placed private property, freedom of association, and voluntary exchange ahead of government control. Subsidiarity added the principle that political and social authority should remain at the lowest level capable of exercising it. American federalism supplied the constitutional architecture: divide power, restrain the center, and leave most decisions to the states and the people.

Applied today, those principles are surprisingly radical. A free market does not mean protecting the corporations that already dominate it. It means ending government privileges that insulate entrenched firms from competition and removing barriers that prevent smaller competitors from entering the market. Let people build homes on their own property, buy food from farmers and bakers they trust, start businesses without navigating rules written for huge corporations with woke HR and legal compliance departments, and decide whether they want surveillance cameras and data centers in their communities. When government intervention is genuinely necessary, require the larger authority to justify taking power upward rather than requiring citizens to justify keeping it.

This is neither the command economy offered by the new socialist left nor the corporatism too often tolerated and even promoted privately by the establishment right.

A free market is not a system in which government chooses which corporations succeed. It is a system in which government stops choosing. It does not require another bureaucracy to redesign society from above. Its premise is almost the reverse: return economic and political power to the people who possess the knowledge, bear the risks, pay the costs, and live with the consequences.

Perhaps that is what the politics of “burn it down” has been missing. Destruction is an impulse, not a governing philosophy. The question for 2028 is not simply where Gen Z moves next, or which party manages to capture its anger. It is whether anyone will offer this generation something more durable than another hollow promise to tear down the existing order. What Gen Z actually needs is the freedom and economic power to build lives of their own choosing.

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References

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