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economic inequality
The US Has Become a Democracy of Insufficient Funds
We achieved universal political rights at the exact historical moment when we dismantled the material conditions that make those rights real.
Oct 26, 2025
In August 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. stood on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and described the Constitution as a promissory note. America had written a check guaranteeing all citizens life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, but when Black Americans presented that check for payment, it came back stamped "insufficient funds."
Sixty years later, that check still bounces. We achieved universal political rights at the exact historical moment when we dismantled the material conditions that make those rights real. This is not an accident of timing. It is the defining contradiction of contemporary American democracy, and it explains everything from our spiraling polarization to our inability to address policies that would actually improve people's lives. Everyone can vote now, but almost no one feels powerful. Political equality is universal, but economic security has become nearly impossible.
Everyone talks about democracy now. Politicians invoke it in every speech. Philanthropists fund initiatives to defend it. Scholars write books diagnosing its decline. But no one seems able to explain what democracy actually means anymore, or why defending it should matter to people whose daily experience suggests it stopped working for them decades ago. We have created a democracy of endurance rather than autonomy, a system that asks citizens to believe in their power while systematically denying them the material stability that makes power meaningful. This is the root cause of our political discontent. When people cannot influence the economic forces that determine whether they have security, they become susceptible to anyone who promises to fight for them, even if that fight is misdirected at the wrong enemies.
Consider Sarah, a registered nurse in Ohio who works three 12-hour shifts at a hospital, then picks up Friday shifts at an urgent care clinic because her wages have not kept pace with her city's cost of living. Last month, her floor went from six nurses to four while patient count stayed at 32. Her health insurance is tied to her employer, which means she cannot quit even as working conditions deteriorate. The math that constrains her life: $1,400 a month for rent, $1,200 for childcare, take-home pay of $3,800. She has saved $8,000 over four years, but a house in her school district requires $60,000 down, which means she is 15 years away from affording a home in the community where she works. She votes in every election, calls her representatives, attends town halls when her schedule permits. Nothing changes. The politicians who promise to fix healthcare never reach her floor, her shift, her patients. When people talk to her about defending democracy, she wonders what exactly they think they are defending.
The economic security that makes political equality real rather than theoretical has been destroyed deliberately over 50 years.
This represents a profound inversion of democracy's original promise. The founders did not conceive of citizenship as something separate from material stability. They understood political equality to require economic autonomy. Not wealth, but independence. Thomas Jefferson imagined a republic of small farmers and artisans, people who owned their tools and their time, who could participate in civic life precisely because they were not dependent on anyone else's permission to survive. James Madison wrote that a republic required citizens who were neither desperate nor dependent, because desperation and dependency make free political participation impossible. If your survival depends on pleasing someone who holds power over you, you cannot freely engage in self-governance. This was the practical foundation of their entire political project. The vision was not egalitarian by our standards. Women, enslaved people, Indigenous nations, anyone without property were all excluded. But the principle underneath contained an insight we have lost: Democracy is not simply procedures for selecting leaders. It is a lived experience of independence that rests on material foundations. When those foundations erode, the procedures become hollow.
We preserved the procedures and expanded them, which represents genuine victories. We universalized suffrage, expanded civil rights, enshrined equality under law. But while we were expanding who could participate, we were simultaneously demolishing the material basis that makes participation meaningful. We achieved universal political equality at precisely the moment when we made economic autonomy nearly impossible for most citizens. The result: Everyone can vote but almost no one feels powerful, rights are universal but agency is scarce, citizens are technically free but structurally dependent on forces they cannot control. This is not the democracy that was promised. It is a performance that asks citizens to believe in their power while the actual decisions that shape their lives are made by forces operating beyond the reach of their vote.
Understanding how we arrived here requires seeing how three transformations compounded one another, each making the next inevitable. The first was the shift from civic independence to wage dependence between 1870 and 1920. In 1900, the average factory worker earned $12.98 per week while Andrew Carnegie's steel profits hit $40 million. This was not just inequality. It was a fundamental alteration of the material basis of citizenship. The founders' citizens owned their means of production. Industrial citizens sold their labor and depended on wages, which meant they depended on employers for survival. Economic liberalism reframed this dependency as freedom. Figures like William Graham Sumner declared the market to be the ultimate democratic institution. Carnegie's "Gospel of Wealth" portrayed industrial capitalism as natural selection perfected. The market became the site of liberty. Wage labor was recast as the pursuit of happiness. But something crucial was lost. The question was no longer whether citizens had independence. It became whether they had access to jobs. Freedom became employment. Security became a paycheck. And when the economy contracted or industries collapsed, citizens discovered their freedom was conditional, contingent, revocable.
Consider Flint, Michigan in the late 1970s. General Motors employed 80,000 workers. Union wages averaged $28 per hour with full benefits and pensions. Auto workers bought homes, raised families, sent their kids to college. They volunteered at schools, coached Little League, attended town meetings, believed the system was working for them. Then in 1986, GM began closing plants. By 1999, 30,000 jobs had disappeared. The Fisher Body Plant sat empty for 20 years before demolition in 2021. The high school's graduating class went from 450 students in 1978 to 180 in 2008. Workers like Tom, who had spent 30 years at Buick City, found themselves at 53 when the plant closed, too young for full pension, too old to retrain. He worked security for $11 an hour until qualifying for early Social Security at 62, collecting $1,100 a month. The procedures of democracy continued. People could still vote, still petition their government. But their actual power to shape their lives had collapsed. They learned that decisions made in distant boardrooms could destroy everything they had built, and their democratic participation could not prevent it.
The second transformation was the conversion of citizens into consumers during post-war affluence. The 1944 GI Bill provided college funding and guaranteed home loans with zero down payment. This was the closest America came to delivering on democracy's material promise for a broad swath of its population, though subsidized by exclusion. The Federal Housing Administration's 1938 Underwriting Manual explicitly recommended against insuring mortgages in Black neighborhoods, creating the redlining that built white middle-class wealth while denying it to Black families. But even for those who benefited, something fundamental shifted. Civic identity gave way to consumer identity. Participation in democracy became less important than participation in markets. The pursuit of happiness became something you could purchase. Milton Friedman's 1962 Capitalism and Freedom recast the New Deal's social citizenship as government overreach. The 1971 Powell Memorandum laid out a strategy for corporate America to reassert political control. Democracy became a lifestyle choice, a matter of consumer confidence. When the consumer economy stopped delivering, people did not lose faith in capitalism. They lost faith in democracy, because democracy had become synonymous with the promise that you could buy your way to independence.
The third transformation was the replacement of the social contract with the survival contract. It began in 1973, when wages stopped tracking productivity. From 1948 to 1973, productivity grew 96.7% and wages grew 91.3%. From 1973 to 2020, productivity grew 69.6% while wages grew just 11.6%. All the gains went elsewhere, to shareholders and executives, to financial instruments and corporate profits. Under Ronald Reagan, this became explicit policy. His 1981 tax cuts reduced top marginal rates from 70% to 28% by 1986. When over 11,000 air traffic controllers struck in August 1981, Reagan fired them all. The message to corporate America: The era of labor compromise was over. The AFL-CIO organized a Solidarity Day march. Four hundred thousand protesters filled Washington. It changed nothing. By the Clinton years, both parties had accepted the logic. A Democratic president signed the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1992, telecommunications deregulation in 1996, welfare reform ending guaranteed assistance in 1996, and Glass-Steagall repeal in 1999. The 2010 Citizens United decision capped this transformation, declaring money to be speech and corporations to be people.
The practical meaning appears in the dismantling of shared security. Pensions became 401(k) accounts. The 401(k) was created accidentally in 1978 as a tax loophole, but by 1983, companies realized they could shift retirement risk to employees. By 2000, only 20% of private-sector workers had traditional pensions. Healthcare became contingent on employment, turning job loss into a medical crisis. Housing became an asset class for investors, making shelter unaffordable for the next generation. Education became debt, making the credential required for middle-class life a decades-long financial burden.
The 2008 financial crisis revealed the logic underlying all these changes. When the system collapsed because of reckless bank speculation, the government moved with stunning speed to rescue the institutions that had caused it. The Troubled Asset Relief Program authorized $700 billion for banks, but including Federal Reserve lending, the actual total exceeded $7.7 trillion. Meanwhile, 3.8 million homes were foreclosed between 2007 and 2010. American families lost $7 trillion in home equity.
Democracy requires citizens secure enough to participate without fear, autonomous enough to speak without permission, stable enough to think beyond survival.
From their apartment window in Las Vegas, Maria and James could see their old house across the street. They watched the grass die that first summer of 2009. They watched neighborhood kids break windows. They watched the Wells Fargo "For Sale" sign fade in the desert sun for 26 months. They had bought the house in 2006 for $285,000 with a 5-1 adjustable-rate mortgage, putting down their entire $20,000 in savings. When James lost his construction job in late 2008, they fell behind on payments. The bank foreclosed in April 2009. They moved into a rental that cost $1,750 a month, nearly as much as their mortgage, watching as their former house sat empty while the bank waited for the market to recover. Their 7-year-old daughter asked why they could not go home, why their house was right there but they could not live in it. They voted in every election. They called their representatives. Nothing changed. The lesson millions learned: Democratic participation was irrelevant to the forces shaping their lives, the government would move mountains to save banks but would not prevent their foreclosure.
This is the democracy of endurance. Democracy in this form does not ask citizens to flourish. It asks them to persist, to absorb market shocks, to manage precarity as if it were a personal failing, to accept that lifelong security is impossible and that resilience is the new civic virtue replacing independence.
The psychological toll accumulates across generations. The Pentagon Papers revealed the government had lied about Vietnam: 58,220 Americans died based on those lies. Richard Nixon resigned after Watergate confirmed that the powerful operated by different rules. The PATRIOT Act authorized warrantless surveillance. The Iraq War began based on weapons of mass destruction that did not exist. The 2008 crisis taught that the system would not protect citizens even when they played by its rules. The pandemic taught that collective action was impossible in America, that survival was an individual responsibility even in a collective catastrophe.
By 2025, Americans live inside the democracy of futility. The defense budget stands at $886 billion while life expectancy fell from 78.9 years in 2014 to 76.4 in 2021, three consecutive years of decline even before Covid-19. Over 100 million Americans carry $195 billion in medical debt, the leading cause of personal bankruptcy. The median home price rose from $329,000 in 2020 to $417,000 in 2024, a 27% increase. The fertility rate dropped to 1.6 children per woman, below replacement level for the first time in recorded history. Young people cannot afford children. Democracy has inverted its moral logic. Citizens exist to sustain the system rather than the system existing to sustain them. They are told to be resilient when they cannot afford healthcare, entrepreneurial when the gig economy pays below minimum wage with no benefits, optimistic when every measure of stability is declining.
Some would argue this diagnosis is too bleak. Poverty rates are lower than in the 1960s. Technology is universal. Life expectancy increased before its recent decline. Perhaps the founders' vision was always mythological. These points miss something fundamental. The question is not whether material conditions are better than 1800 or 1960. The question is whether citizens possess the economic independence necessary to participate meaningfully in self-governance. Sixty percent of Americans cannot afford a $1,000 emergency expense. The algorithms that govern what we see and earn are controlled by five companies. Life expectancy decline is unprecedented among developed nations. The founders' vision was exclusionary, but the principle was sound: Democracy requires citizens secure enough to participate without fear, autonomous enough to speak without permission, stable enough to think beyond survival.
The authoritarians understand this in ways defenders of democracy often do not. They do not win by attacking democracy directly. They win by speaking to what people actually feel: abandoned by systems that claim to represent them, ignored by institutions that ask for their participation but never respond, betrayed by promises that work and responsibility will lead to security. They offer concrete emotional promises. Safety through control. Belonging through exclusion. Pride through domination. Revenge against elites who rigged the system. They name enemies and promise someone will finally fight for you, even if that fight requires destroying the institutions that failed to protect you. Here is what makes this dangerous: Authoritarians are not wrong about the diagnosis, only the cure. They correctly identify that democracy has failed to deliver economic stability, that institutions serve the powerful, that citizens have been abandoned. Where they diverge is in attributing this to immigrants rather than to the systematic dismantling of economic security, to cultural elites rather than to decisions that prioritized capital over people. They promise to restore independence through dominance rather than shared security, through destruction rather than reconstruction. In a nation where security has been made deliberately scarce, that promise has terrible power because it offers at least the possibility of change, even if that change comes through destruction.
Unlike a liquidated bank, democracy can be rebuilt. The question is whether we will choose to rebuild it on foundations that can actually support what we claim to value.
Defenders of democracy respond with process and principle. Rule of law. Constitutional norms. Institutional integrity. These are not wrong, but they are insufficient. In a nation where most people have never felt the law was on their side, where the Constitution seems to protect everyone's freedom except theirs, these responses sound like requests to protect a system that has already abandoned them. Telling people to trust institutions when those institutions have spent 50 years demonstrating they will prioritize capital over people, rescue banks before homeowners, bail out corporations while letting citizens drown in debt, is not persuasive. It is insulting.
The question is not whether American democracy will survive. Institutions persist long after they stop serving their stated purpose. The question is whether what survives deserves to be called democracy at all. A republic where citizens have suffrage but not independence, rights but not stability, participation but not power, is not government of the people, by the people, for the people. It is a performance that maintains procedures while ensuring actual governance happens elsewhere, in boardrooms and markets and algorithms beyond democratic accountability.
We are living through an unprecedented moment of government stepping back from its responsibilities and direct attacks on democratic institutions. The Trump era will end, no matter how much it feels like it cannot or will not. History teaches us that no political moment lasts forever. When this moment passes, we cannot proceed with the old normal, cannot return to the arrangements that produced this crisis. We cannot rebuild a democracy of endurance and call it restoration. We must make good on the promissory note that King described, must finally cash the check for all citizens, not just in political rights but in material security.
This means universal policies that guarantee the material foundations of democratic citizenship. Medicare for All that severs the link between employment and healthcare, eliminating the structural dependency that makes workers afraid to organize or leave bad situations. Affordable housing policies that recognize shelter as a human need rather than an asset class. Universal childcare that allows parents to participate in civic life. Strengthened labor rights and higher minimum wages that give workers genuine bargaining power. Student debt cancellation and free public college. These are not radical proposals. They are completions of the New Deal project abandoned before full realization, an acknowledgment that political democracy requires economic security. Other developed democracies provide these securities and remain capitalist economies. What makes them radical in America is that they would actually address the root cause of our democratic crisis, would restore the material foundations that make democratic participation more than performance.
The resistance will be fierce because these policies threaten arrangements that have made some people very rich while making most people precarious. But the alternative is continuing to pretend that democracy can function without material security, that citizens can govern themselves when they cannot govern their own lives, that political equality means anything when economic inequality makes it purely formal. The alternative is watching democracy become an increasingly hollow performance, watching polarization deepen as people search desperately for someone to blame, watching authoritarian movements grow stronger because they at least promise change even if destructive. The alternative is discovering that you cannot maintain the fiction indefinitely, that eventually people stop believing in promises never kept, that a democracy of insufficient funds will eventually run out of credit entirely.
Martin Luther King's insufficient funds metaphor continues to resonate because it names not just a failure of inclusion but a betrayal of promise. The check did not just bounce because the bank refused to honor it for certain customers. The check bounced because the bank itself was liquidated. The material basis for democracy's promise has been systematically dismantled and sold for parts. The economic security that makes political equality real rather than theoretical has been destroyed deliberately over 50 years.
But unlike a liquidated bank, democracy can be rebuilt. The question is whether we will choose to rebuild it on foundations that can actually support what we claim to value. The check marked insufficient funds was returned to the idea of democracy itself, to the promise that political equality could exist without material security, to the belief that we could preserve the forms of self-governance while abandoning its foundations. We have yet to reckon with what we owe. But reckoning is possible, reconstruction is possible, if we are willing to admit what has been lost and commit to building something more honest, more just, more capable of delivering on the promises democracy makes.
The democracy of insufficient funds does not have to be permanent. It is a choice we have made collectively over 50 years. We can make different choices. But first we have to acknowledge what democracy actually requires: that you cannot ask people to govern themselves when they cannot govern their own lives, that political equality without material security is not democracy but its opposite, and that a check returned for insufficient funds will keep bouncing until the account is finally funded with something real.
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Economic Populism Is the Key to Rust Belt Votes
A new study found that progressive economic populism can win back Rust Belt voters—inside the Democratic Party where necessary, outside it where possible.
Oct 08, 2025
Democrats know they have a problem with working-class voters but don’t agree on the cause. Commentators chalk Kamala Harris’ 2024 loss to high prices, an unusually short campaign cycle, or voter resentment against the possibility of having an African American woman as president. But the Democratic Party’s working-class woes have much deeper roots.
Many voters in key battleground states feel burned by decades of Democrats’ unrealized promises to improve the lives of working people, failure to reign in obscene economic inequality, and support for economically disastrous policies—from NAFTA to the entrance of China to the World Trade Organization—that led to the loss of countless jobs and futures in their states.
A new study from the Center for Working-Class Politics (CWCP), with the Labor Institute and Rutgers University, uses a 3,000-person YouGov survey in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania to test whether economic populism—tapping into resentment and insecurity from decades of corporate excess and bipartisan neglect—can win back voters who’ve turned away from the Democratic Party.
Let’s start with the good news. Economic populism is popular among Rust Belt voters—particularly when it explicitly calls out corporate greed and mass layoffs. Strong economic populism—as opposed to “populist-lite” messaging that acknowledges there are few bad apples in the otherwise healthy barrel of large corporations—was particularly popular among many of the groups Democrats have struggled to reach: working-class voters, voters without a four-year college degree, voters whose incomes are less than $50k per year, and Latino voters.
If Democrats want to win, they’ll need to put delivering good jobs and holding corporations accountable at the center of everything they do and say.
But if economic populism is so popular, why did even the most stalwart Rust Belt economic populists—like former Ohio Sen. Sherrod Brown—struggle in 2024? The survey reveals that the Democratic Party label often drags the message underwater. When the very same populist message was delivered by a candidate labeled “Democrat” rather than “Independent,” support dropped by an average of 8.4 points—a gap that balloons into double digits in Michigan, Ohio, and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, by contrast, there’s no meaningful penalty. In races decided by a few points, that brand discount can prove decisive.
To identify the best path forward for economic populists, the survey next assessed Rust Belt voters’ top economic policy priorities. Across ideological lines, respondents prioritized policies framed around fairness, anti-corruption, and economic security. Proposals like capping prescription drug prices, stopping corporate price gouging, and reigning in political corruption were among the top priorities regardless of partisanship or class. Policies to raise taxes on the wealthy and expand access to good jobs also performed well.
A new proposal barring companies that take taxpayer money from laying off workers also polled surprisingly well—and held up under Republican attacks. The policy was popular even though respondents had never heard of it and it challenges corporations’ right to chase short-term profit at communities’ expense, putting it well outside the acceptable range of mainstream Democratic economic proposals. The policy directly channels Rust Belt communities’ resentment over decades of mass layoffs into a commonsense rule—“if you take from the public, you can’t harm the public”—while signaling a tougher, jobs-first stance than Democrats typically embrace.
Costly or abstract proposals—such as $1,000 monthly payments to all Americans or a trillion-dollar industrial policy for clean energy—as well as traditional conservative ideas like corporate tax cuts and deregulation ranked poorly overall, drawing only pockets of partisan support.
The survey results suggest two simultaneous paths to success for economic populists. In competitive districts where running as an Independent would do little beyond ensure Republican victory, a party hoping to win back the working class should rebuild the Democratic brand by running disciplined and bold economic populist campaigns around policies to reduce costs, create good jobs, and hold elites accountable. Candidates who show independence from donor-class priorities and build a track record as champions of working-class priorities can still make the “D” stand for something again.
In other contexts, however, economic populists should test independent campaigns—following the model of Nebraska’s 2024 Independent Senate candidate Dan Osborne. This should be strategic, targeting deep-red districts and states where running outside the Democratic Party won’t simply hand the race to Republicans, but there are many places where it could be viable. The study also finds majority support for creating an Independent Workers Political Association to back such efforts, with enthusiasm highest among non-college voters, young people, voters of color, and the economically insecure, and with meaningful support from Independents and Republicans as well.
In short, progressive economic populism can win back Rust Belt voters—inside the Democratic Party where necessary, outside it where possible. The most effective strategy is not mysterious: Speak plainly about who profits from layoffs and price gouging and focus obsessively on policies that put workers first. If Democrats want to win, they’ll need to put delivering good jobs and holding corporations accountable at the center of everything they do and say. The path to victory in 2026 and beyond lies in giving voters a reason to believe that Democrats (and independent economic populists) have their backs while Republicans continue to cut workers’ benefits and do nothing to bring back jobs and dignity to long-suffering Rust Belt communities.
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Why It Matters That Male and Female Economists See the Economy Differently
In a significant new study published by the Institute for New Economic Thinking, Canadian economist Mohsen Javdani reveals that gender shapes views on power, equality, and inclusion in ways politics alone can’t explain.
Sep 14, 2025
Men and women might check the same box on election day, but they see the economy through different lenses. Just ask professional economists.
That’s the striking implication of a new study by Mohsen Javdani, associate professor of economics at Simon Fraser University, who surveyed over 2,400 economists across 19 countries. His research reveals that gender shapes how they understand economic issues in ways politics alone can’t explain—and warrants attention from policymakers and campaigns alike.
Javdani wasn’t just chasing numbers; he was looking for patterns in what economists believe and focus on. What he found: Women in the field (still underrepresented) are more likely to challenge traditional theories, promote equality and social justice, and push for a more inclusive economics. They tend to lean further left than their male colleagues, who are more often centrists or right leaning.
Probably no surprise there.
But here’s the twist: Even when the men and women shared the same political beliefs, they still interpreted economics differently. Right-leaning female economists, for example, were more likely than their male peers to question orthodox ideas and emphasize equality and inclusion. Javdani’s data suggests that as economists shift right politically, men abandon progressive views more quickly than women do.
Simply put, political labels often try to explain it all, but they miss a big piece: Gender is at work behind the scenes.
If right-leaning women are more receptive to progressive economic ideas than their male counterparts, then campaigns that speak directly to these women could unlock a powerful, untapped base for fairness and inclusion.
So, just pack the room with more women and expect the conversation to shift? Not so fast.
Javdani points to earlier research by Giulia Zacchia and others, showing that numbers alone don’t cut it, especially if the loudest voices still echo the same old male-dominated, market-centered dogma. Without structural changes and real efforts to open the field to new ideas, the issues women tend to bring to the table, like labor protections, inequality, and a more hands-on role for government, keep getting sidelined. New faces, same soundtrack. Female economists are out there pushing for redistribution, calling out bias, and demanding better, but if no one’s listening, the system stays stuck.
This isn’t just academic—what’s at stake is a real understanding of how the economy hits women, what they contribute, and why their labor keeps getting undervalued.
Javdani’s study breaks new ground by showing how politics can blur—but never erase—the gender gap in economic thinking. As he writes:
While moving rightward on the political spectrum is consistently associated with weaker support for progressive and equity-oriented positions, the decline is less steep among women. In several cases—particularly among right- and far-right-leaning economists—women remained more supportive of positions emphasizing inequality, structural disadvantage, and concern about corporate power.
For anyone trying to grasp how voters think about the economy, this research is very suggestive.
Javdani study samples only economists, but it is difficult to believe that the differences he documents do not extend far more broadly, and that if we want to understand economic opinions at the ballot box, we have to look beyond party lines and pay attention to gender.
A recent NBC News poll, for example, shows a wide gap between conservative young male voters and their liberal female counterparts on issues like financial independence, debt, and home ownership. And a new Gallup survey reveals meaningful differences in how male and female respondents view capitalism and socialism—with men viewing capitalism more positively than women, and the reverse for socialism.
But significantly, there are also large gaps among men and women in the same political categories. A March 2025 Pew analysis found Republican women were more than twice as likely as Republican men to see employer bias as a major cause of the gender wage gap (43% vs. 18%). Meanwhile, polling by Navigator Research shows American women are consistently more pessimistic about the economy than men, across race, income, and party lines. This stems from how women experience the economy day-to-day—focusing on costs like groceries, rent, and healthcare rather than abstract numbers like GDP or the stock market.
As a result, women tend to strongly support policies that directly ease these burdens, from paid family leave and the Child Tax Credit to cracking down on corporate price gouging.
Yet much economic messaging still treats the economy as gender-neutral—a costly oversight for anyone hoping to connect with voters. Javdani’s research points to a missed opportunity: If right-leaning women are more receptive to progressive economic ideas than their male counterparts, then campaigns that speak directly to these women could unlock a powerful, untapped base for fairness and inclusion.
Talking about economics like gender doesn’t matter is like playing checkers in a chess game. When you meet people where they actually are, not where your ideological playbook says they should be, you stop talking past each other, and start building something real, like an economy that works for everybody.
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