Nykia Wright didn’t open the general session of the National Association of Realtors’ 2026 Legislative Meetings with a policy update or a market outlook. She opened it with a confession.
The NAR CEO told a packed room at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., on Monday that she faces opposition within the association — people who don’t think like her, who challenge her, who see things differently. Then she told them that’s exactly how she wants it.
“I certainly deal with that at the National Association,” Wright said, describing the internal friction she navigates in her role. The framework she said she uses to turn that friction into strength is Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s study of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, a team deliberately built from his fiercest rivals.
Wright said she first read Goodwin’s Team of Rivals before earning her MBA, and the book reshaped how she thought about leadership. Understanding “the sting of working with people who had different views, who are smart and who challenged you in different ways,” she said, became foundational to how she leads.
The choice to open the event’s general session first thing Monday morning, just as Realtors prepare to lobby Congress, with that message seemed strategic. Select members are heading to Capitol Hill on Wednesday; Wright framed the session not as a pep talk but as a history lesson in what it takes to move people past division toward a common goal.
Goodwin, who joined Wright on stage for a wide-ranging conversation on presidential leadership, traced that thread across nearly 250 years of American history. From George Washington stepping down after two terms to FDR’s first inaugural address, she returned repeatedly to a single idea: The leaders who shaped the country did so not by eliminating opposition but by pulling it inside the tent.
“These are the strongest, most able men in the country, and I need them by my side,” Goodwin said, paraphrasing Lincoln’s reasoning for appointing his rivals to his cabinet. “Countries in peril” don’t have the luxury of surrounding themselves with agreement.
Goodwin drew a direct line from that philosophy to the current moment. The Industrial Revolution, she argued, produced the same fractures the country faces now — a widening gap between classes, a sense that different groups were becoming “the other” rather than common citizens. Theodore Roosevelt, she said, responded by building a coalition across those divides, traveling the country for months with a single message: A square deal for the rich and the poor, the capitalist and the laborer.
“It’s hard to imagine what leadership can do,” Goodwin said, describing FDR’s first inaugural address and the way it changed the mood of a paralyzed country overnight. Headlines the next day, she said, read: “We have a leader. We have a government. The government still lives.”
Goodwin described FDR and Churchill as leaders who sustained their countries through crisis not through strategy alone but through belief — injecting their own confidence into demoralized populations the way a preacher moves a congregation. That, she said, is what leadership at its most powerful can do.
Goodwin also connected the work of Realtors to the earliest foundations of American democracy. Thomas Jefferson, she noted, believed that land ownership was central to self-governance, that people who owned their own homes would have stability, dignity and a stake in their communities. “What you guys are all doing today,” she told the crowd, “it’s right here at the beginning of our creation as a country.”
The Fair Housing Act threaded through the conversation as well. Goodwin traced its passage through LBJ’s presidency, from Kennedy’s delayed executive order to Johnson’s decision to make the Civil Rights Act his first priority, famously responding to advisers who warned him he’d spend his political capital for nothing with the question: “Then what the hell is the presidency for?”
Wright did not shy away from the parallels to NAR’s own recent history. The association has navigated years of legal, financial and reputational turbulence, and Wright has faced public scrutiny of her leadership since taking the role. Her decision to share a conversation with a historian who built her career studying how leaders govern through crisis, and specifically through internal opposition, sent a message that the packed room did not appear to miss.
Character, Goodwin said near the close of the session, is the through line across every president she has studied. “What is character?” she asked. “A combination of qualities: Humility and empathy and resilience and accountability and responsibility and developing trust and having an ambition for something larger than oneself.”
That, she said, is what history asks of leaders, and what it will ask of this moment.
