Leiter, who served as communications director for the DCCC during the 2020 election cycle and worked at the campaign arm in the previous cycle, recently joined the consulting firm Purple Strategies as a campaign manager. His clients include Fortune 100 and 500 companies.

Starting out: Leiter felt drawn to politics since he was young, growing up in Raleigh, N.C., where his parents were active in the community. “Both of my parents were the kind of people who would show up at neighborhood association, zoning board and city council meetings,” he recalls. “I remember knocking doors for neighbors who were running for office — mayor, school board, state legislature — when I was in second and third grade.” One of those candidates is now in the House: Democrat Deborah K. Ross, who represents the state’s 2nd District. “The thing that got me hooked was seeing the kind of impact that an engaged group of community leaders can have in the direction of their city or their community,” Leiter says.

Most unforgettable campaign moment: Most of Leiter’s most unforgettable moments, he says, are “really the ones you’d want to forget, except you made them in a foxhole with lifetime friends.” But he still savors the memory of the 2018 election when Democrats won control of the House. “We knew we had left it all out on the field, and the whole moment was at another level after we had collectively taken it on the teeth in 2016,” he says.

Biggest campaign regret: “It is really valuable for people who are communicators or think of themselves as strategists to spend time talking to real voters, not just reporters and donors,” he says. “I regret not spending more time talking to persuadable voters at the doors, to figure out what matters to them and makes them tick. Surprisingly, it’s not Twitter!”

Unconventional wisdom: Leiter says three trends are going under-noticed. One is that voters of color are the “beating heart and soul of the Democratic Party” but that it’s the college-educated white voters who are “dragging the party to the left.” “When people talk about communicating to voters of color, they have a knee-jerk assumption that means you need to push a more liberal policy position. The reality is that isn’t necessarily how you meet voters of color where they are and instead is catering to loud, white liberals. There are moderate and conservative Democrats of color at the core of our coalition you are potentially alienating,” Leiter says. “It’s an existential tension that the party has to work out.” The second trend, he says, is that access to abortion care for people in need is a popular position and Democrats engaging in a back-and-forth on abortion rights “is not a poisonous policy conversation,” when it comes to swing voters. And third, he says, reporters are so “hamstrung by their desire to present a ‘both sides’ narrative on every issue that they end up characterizing coordinated Republican voter suppression as an equal and legitimate position to work to protect access to the ballot,” rather than as an “existential threat to our democracy.”