What It Took to Win: A History of the Democratic Party is timely and ambitious. Many observers have expressed real doubts about the ability of the Democratic Party to win elections because of (but certainly not limited to) the poorly handled 2020 census, state voter-suppression laws, Supreme Court decisions upholding those laws, and partisan gerrymandering. But Michael Kazin takes a refreshingly different approach. What It Took to Win offers a sweeping narrative emphasizing how remarkable past Democratic Party victories were from the early nineteenth century through the 2020 election.Kazin does not go into the statistics that excite the 538.com crowd. He instead looks at continuity and tension within the party as its leaders and members navigated tumultuous national events before the Civil War and through the COVID-19 epidemic. What It Took to Win subsequently includes a fair number of Democratic presidents but also fascinating portraits of well-known partisans (like Stephen Douglas and Eleanor Roosevelt) and Democrats who deserve far more attention in textbooks and monographs devoted to political history (like New York activist Belle Moscowitz and New York representative Adam Clayton Powell Jr.).Kazin contends that moral capitalism represents an important thread of continuity running throughout the party's past two hundred years. He borrows that idea from Lizabeth Cohen's Making a New Deal: Industrial Workers in Chicago (1990) to show how the party has triumphed when it pursued policies “designed to make life more prosperous, or at least more secure, for ordinary people” (x). That promise, especially when they delivered on it, “proved capable of uniting Democrats and winning over enough voters to enable the party to create a governing majority that could last for more than one or two election cycles” (x).Kazin also emphasizes two often competing, sometimes complementary, tendencies within moral capitalism. The first was a criticism of concentrated power, which took the form of anti-monopoly sentiments in the nineteenth century. The second was a rebuke of workplace oppression, such as campaigns against terrible working conditions in the Progressive Era. Critical to Democratic triumph, from Kazin's point of view, was a shift from fear of federal power, such as Andrew Jackson's crusade against the Second National Bank, to New Dealers’ efforts to police the bankers, whom FDR publicly promised to cast out of the halls of power in his first inaugural address. That shift happened alongside broadening a concern for Jefferson's yeoman farmers to include consideration of the industrial working conditions of white, native-born and European immigrants, and, even later, opportunities for African Americans to fully participate in civil society. What It Took to Win fittingly ends with Local 226 of the Las Vegas Culinary Workers, which currently represents workers from over 170 countries who speak more than forty languages, the majority of whom are women, marching through Caesar's Palace chanting, “We vote, we win!” (319).What It Took to Win does not ignore the Democratic Party's racist past. Kazin boldly deems the antebellum, Civil War, and postbellum periods (1848–74) the era of “conserv[ing] the white man's republic,” during which northern Democrats preyed on white textile workers’ fears of job competition with freed people. That observation contributes to ongoing scholarship on the complex role working people played in advocating for abolition in the North. Protecting white supremacy also plays an important part in provocative comparisons between the North and South in the Gilded Age, when Kazin shows state parties to be ruled in both regions by men best described as “bosses” (83).Yet What It Took to Win exaggerates the degree to which the Democratic Party could ever have been called social democratic. Kazin contends that the Democratic Party might be best described as an “American Labor Party” when it controlled Congress and the White House from 1933 to 1948. That characterization of the Democratic Party aligns with Cohen's story about Chicago more than thirty years ago. Kazin includes the standard account of how southern Democrats fought to exclude agricultural and domestic workers from the Wagner and Social Security Acts. Yet urban business elites, recent scholarship has highlighted, also worked to exclude public employees, who were part of the machine politics that sustained and transformed the party in northern and midwestern states and cities (including Chicago). Those insights have added to robust scholarship showing how the New Deal and its order reformed and bolstered capitalism, especially favoring larger corporations (like Detroit's Big Three automakers) that could adapt to and even profit from reforms. That research drew attention to the businessmen in Roosevelt's inner circle, including Joseph Kennedy, who shaped a lot of the New Deal's hallmark legislation, including banking reforms and the 1935 Wagner and Social Security Acts. Kodak Eastman executive Marion Folsom, for example, did a lot to craft the latter, laying the foundation for what many historians describe as the United States’ public/private welfare state. Banking reforms also helped the financiers involved, including Italian immigrant A. P. Giannini. He used those laws to rapidly expand his small San Francisco outfit (originally the Bank of Italy) into Bank of America and aided New Dealers’ efforts to thwart Upton Sinclair's storied 1934 Democratic run for governor of California.The complexity of the Roosevelt era's political coalitions highlights the larger questions lurking in the background of Kazin's book: Who really won, and what did it take to govern? Those questions were important to labor scholars interested in ordinary people's past, present, and future ability to democratize politics and workplaces even before the Biden Administration and Congress, which Democrats controlled, interfered in 2022 negotiations between rail companies and workers. It has been (and remains) one thing to win an election and another to truly govern. Woven throughout evocative portrayals of politicians’ triumphs are structural limits to ordinary people's ability to rule or be truly represented. The Constitution, written in the late eighteenth century, checks the people's (not just the federal government's) power, does not mention political parties, and has been hard to amend even as the expectations for representative democracy and citizenship rights have evolved. Those rules denied the majority their choice many times, from 1824, when most chose Andrew Jackson, to 2016, when Hillary Clinton won the popular vote. Just as importantly, popular support has not guaranteed and does not assure the congressional majorities needed to govern, even as more Americans demanded and exercised their right to vote. The same elected and unelected branches of government at the federal, state, and local levels have threatened and imperiled Americans’ rights on and off the job. As such, Kazin's final description of Local 226 chanting “We vote, we win!” in 2020 reminds us that there is a lot more to do for the people, not just the party, to win and govern.