Dean Roy is fourteen years old. He’s a freshman at Stowe High School. He works at his parents’ pizza shop. And he just became the first person under 18 in Vermont history to qualify for the general election ballot for governor. He formed his own political party — the Freedom and Unity Party — because apparently the existing parties weren’t getting the job done, and a high school kid decided he’d handle it himself.
What a time to be alive. Generation Alpha just looked at the entire political establishment and said, “I could do better, and I haven’t even taken my driver’s test yet.”
Here’s the beautiful thing about Vermont’s constitution: there is no minimum age requirement for governor. None. The founders of Vermont either assumed no kid would ever be crazy enough to run, or they were smart enough to realize that age has absolutely nothing to do with competence. Given the performance of most adult politicians in this country, we’re going with the second option.
Dean’s platform reads like something a seasoned conservative strategist would put together, except it was written by a kid who still has a hard bedtime. Housing affordability. Lower taxes. Energy independence. Healthcare reform. And — here’s the big one — rejecting Vermont’s electric vehicle mandate. The kid took one look at the state government forcing people to buy $60,000 electric cars that can’t make it through a Vermont winter without dying on the side of Route 89, and said “No thanks.”
(He’s fourteen and he already has more common sense than the entire Vermont legislature combined. We should be embarrassed as a society.)
Dean served as a legislative page at the Vermont Statehouse last year, which means he’s actually seen how the sausage gets made up close. Most adults who witness that process come away disgusted and never want anything to do with politics again. This kid came away and said, “Hold my pizza dough, I’m running for governor.” That’s either incredible courage or the blissful ignorance of youth, and honestly, at this point in American politics, what’s the difference?
The professional political class doesn’t know what to do with this. Vermont’s Democratic establishment — which has been running the state like their personal progressive laboratory for decades — can’t exactly attack a fourteen-year-old without looking like monsters. They can’t ignore him either, because he’s already getting more media coverage than half the declared candidates. So they’re doing what politicians always do when they’re confused: issuing carefully worded statements about “respecting the democratic process” while privately hoping he goes away.
He’s not going away.
The Freedom and Unity Party. Think about that name for a second. Freedom and unity. Not “equity and inclusion.” Not “justice and transformation.” Not whatever focus-grouped, consultant-approved nonsense the Democrats are running on this cycle. A kid in a pizza shop apron looked at American politics and picked the two words that actually matter.
Now, is Dean Roy going to win the governor’s race? Probably not. He can’t vote for himself. He can’t drive himself to campaign events. His biggest donor is presumably his mom. But that’s not really the point, is it?
The point is that a fourteen-year-old kid looked at the adults in charge — the career politicians, the lobbyists, the consultants, the party bosses — and decided they were failing so badly that a high school freshman with a part-time job at a pizza shop might actually be an improvement. And the terrifying thing is… he might be right.
Vermont’s current crop of politicians has given the state some of the highest property taxes in America, an EV mandate that ignores basic geography, an energy policy that makes heating your home in January feel like a luxury, and housing costs that have pushed working families out of communities their grandparents built. Dean Roy doesn’t have a political science degree. He doesn’t have a Super PAC. He doesn’t have consultants running focus groups in Burlington.
But he has a pizza shop, a platform that makes sense, and the guts to put his name on a ballot while the adults were busy arguing about pronouns.
Run, kid, run. The adults clearly aren’t getting it done.
And if any of the professional politicians running against him want to debate a ninth-grader on the EV mandate, we would pay actual money to watch that. Someone set up the cameras.