Tipsheet

Sixty-Six Percent of Republicans Support Rent-Control—No Wonder There's An Appetite For Socialism

Dmitri Bolt
Dmitri Bolt  |  July 10, 2026 12:15 PM

There may, in fact, be some cases where we should trust the experts. 

We all know rent control, or really any form of price control, is a terrible policy. It degrades the quality of whatever good or service it's imposed on, and it seduces voters into judging a policy by its intention rather than its result, a problem the world-renowned economist and conservative icon Milton Friedman spent much of his career warning about. 

Nowhere is that warning better illustrated than in Zohran Mamdani's New York City. Mamdani was elected, in large part, because he promised to make housing more affordable through rent control.

But the problem runs far wider than Mamdani, or New York, or even the left. A 2018 study from Zillow Economic Research, which has been circulating on social media, found that 75 percent of Americans in major metro areas favor limits on rent increases, including 80 percent of Democrats and a striking 66 percent of Republicans.

According to the study, rent control's "popularity transcends housing tenure (84 percent of renters and 70 percent of homeowners support the idea), age (74 percent of young adults age 18 to 34, and 76 percent of prime working age and older adults support the idea), and political party affiliation (80 percent among respondents who 'lean Democrat' and 66 percent of respondents who 'lean Republican' support the idea)."

And yet, according to a 2026 study by the University of Chicago’s Kent A. Clark Center for Global Markets, 81 percent of economists say rent control has not had a “positive impact” on the availability and quality of broadly affordable rental housing in cities that have implemented those policies over the past 30 years.

This may be yet another glimpse into why socialism remains popular among Democrats, and why capitalism is now viewed unfavorably by a majority of Americans across the board. If a policy this thoroughly discredited by economics can still command support from two-thirds of Republicans and four-fifths of Democrats alike, it's hard to argue Americans are rejecting bad economic ideas

And the study circulating is from 2018. Given everything that's happened since, a pandemic-era affordability crisis, years of runaway rent growth in major cities, and a political moment where a democratic socialist can win the largest city in America running explicitly on rent freezes, there's little reason to think rent control's popularity has done anything but grow. If anything, the case against capitalism, and for socialist-style economic intervention, likely looks stronger to the average American today than it did in 2018.

"Populism in a nutshell," Jessica Riedl, a budget and tax fellow at the Brookings Institution, wrote on X. "Public opinion is great for setting goals (lower housing costs!) and terrible for setting the policies to achieve them. Its the difference between asking voters whether we should try to go to Mars vs. the exact science & engineering to get us there."