What It Took To Win by Michael Kazin

A concise political history that traces the party’s evolution from early populist and Jeffersonian roots through the New Deal coalition and the civil‑rights realignment to the late 20th‑ and early 21st‑century struggles over policy and identity; it shows how winning required repeated reinventions—building broad, often uneasy coalitions of workers, immigrants, African Americans, Southerners, and professionals—necessitating compromises between principle and pragmatism, and highlights the recurring tension between grassroots movements and party leaders as well as the lessons those battles offer for future electoral strategy.

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