A new Wall Street Journal poll offers a sobering look at why progressives have found it so easy to gain ground recently, why free markets are rapidly being pushed to the margins of economic policymaking in both parties, and why the United States could quite literally find itself voting its way into socialism.
The poll tested public opinion on roughly 30 policies, including price caps, rent control, minimum-wage mandates, and government ownership stakes in private companies, interventions once firmly associated with the political left. Yet many of those same policies now command broad support across the electorate, even as the survey slightly overrepresented Republicans and Republican-leaning independents.
The old partisan dividing line over economic freedom is becoming harder to find.
A lot of bad, popular ideas
— Marc Porter Magee 🎓 (@marcportermagee) September 30, 2026
New WSJ survey pic.twitter.com/g50yBNxCU9
The survey found overwhelming support for a slate of interventions that would have once been unmistakably identified with the progressive left.
Eighty-seven percent of respondents favored prescription-drug price controls, 79 percent backed capping credit-card interest rates at 10 percent, and 74 percent supported price controls for child care. Another 65 percent favored limiting annual rent increases to no more than five percentage points above inflation.
The appetite for intervention extended well beyond consumer prices. Seventy-five percent supported restricting institutional investors from buying single-family homes, while 66 percent favored raising Social Security taxes on high earners. Meanwhile, 61 percent supported a federal billionaire tax, 59 percent backed Medicare for All, and 62 percent favored the federal government taking ownership stakes in private companies. A $20 federal minimum wage drew support from 57 percent, while 59 percent favored a pied-Ă -terre tax. Even a pause on AI development, a policy that could put American innovation on ice while foreign competitors press ahead, won the support of 63 percent of those surveyed.
Perhaps the most revealing, and, frankly, absurd, part is that the proposals were labeled as being either “Democrat” or “Republican” before respondents were asked for their views. Yet instead of producing an overwhelming party-line split, the survey found strong support for policies favoring consumer price controls, higher taxes on the wealthy, restrictions on corporate investors, and government intervention in prescription-drug costs. Voters apparently remain committed to ideological principles, provided those principles come with a price cap and a promise that the costs will fall on someone else.
The survey interviewed 1,500 registered voters nationally from Sept. 16 through Sept. 21, 2026, including 675 phone interviews and 825 text-to-web interviews. Its partisan breakdown was 36 percent Republican, 33 percent Democrat, 8 percent independent or Republican-leaning, 9 percent independent or Democratic-leaning, and 9 percent independent. That gave Republicans and Republican-leaning respondents a modest edge in the sample, making the breadth of support for traditionally left-wing economic policies even harder to dismiss as a simple artifact of Democratic oversampling.
This is how the United States finds itself voting for socialism: not because of a smarmy politician like Zohran Mamdani, nor because of a DSA-backed insurgency within the Democrat Party, but because Americans are demanding it, and very few are standing in opposition or making the case for the principles and efficacy of economic freedom.
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