NAR CEO Nikia Wright told a standing room audience at the association’s 2026 Legislative Conference that she faces opposition within the NAR and that historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s study of Lincoln’s rival teams has taught her to treat it as a strength.
Nikia Wright did not present a policy update or market outlook at the beginning of the National Association of Realtors’ 2026 Legislative Conference session. She started it off with a confession.
NAR’s CEO told a packed room at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center in Washington, D.C., Monday that she faces opposition within the association, people who don’t think like her, challenge her and see things differently. Then she told them that was exactly what she wanted.
“I certainly deal with that issue in the national association,” Wright said, speaking of the internal conflicts he faces in his role. The framework she uses to turn that friction into power is Pulitzer Prize-winning presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin’s study of Abraham Lincoln’s cabinet, a team intentionally constructed from his fiercest rivals.
Wright first read Goodwin’s “Team of Rivals” before earning her MBA and said the book changed the way she thought about leadership. Understanding “the pain of working with people who have different views, who are smart, who challenge you in different ways,” was the foundation of her leadership, she said.
As real estate agents prepare to lobby Congress, the choice to hold the event’s public session first thing Monday morning seemed strategic with that message in mind. Selected members will head to the Capitol on Wednesday. Rather than pep talk, Wright framed the session as a history lesson about what it takes to move people across divisions toward common goals.
Mr. Goodwin joined Mr. Wright on stage for a wide-ranging conversation about presidential leadership and a thread through nearly 250 years of American history. From the time George Washington left office after two terms to FDR’s first inaugural address, she returned to one idea repeatedly. The idea was that the leaders who shaped the country achieved their opposition not by eliminating the opposition, but by bringing them into their tents.
“These are the strongest, most capable people in this country, and I need them by my side,” Goodwin said, paraphrasing Lincoln’s reasons for appointing his rivals to the Cabinet. “Countries in crisis” cannot afford to wrangle an agreement.
Goodwin drew a direct line from that philosophy to the present. The Industrial Revolution created the same rifts the country faces today, she argued. There is a widening gap between classes, a sense that different groups are becoming “others” rather than ordinary citizens. She says Theodore Roosevelt responded by building coalitions across these divides and traveling the country for months with a single message: “Fair trade for rich and poor, capitalists and workers.”
“It’s hard to imagine what a leader can do,” Goodwin said, referring to FDR’s first inaugural address and how it changed the mood of a paralyzed nation overnight. The next day’s headline was, “We have a leader. We have a government. The government is still alive.”
Goodwin described FDR and Churchill as leaders who overcame crises not just with strategy but with faith, injecting self-confidence into a depressed nation like a preacher mobilizing a congregation. That’s what the strongest leadership can do, she said.
Goodwin also connected the work of a real estate agent to the early foundations of American democracy. Thomas Jefferson believed that land ownership was central to self-government and that people who owned their own homes could have the right to stability, dignity, and community, she noted. “What you are doing today is the very beginning of building our nation,” she told the crowd.
The Fair Housing Act was also brought up in the conversation. Goodwin traced LBJ’s rise to the presidency, from Kennedy’s belated executive orders to Johnson’s decision to make civil rights legislation a top priority, and famously responded to an adviser who warned him that he was wasting political funds by asking, “So what is the presidency for?”
Wright did not shy away from drawing parallels with the NAR’s own recent history. The association has weathered years of legal, financial and reputational turmoil, but Wright has faced intense public scrutiny of his leadership since taking office. Her decision to share a conversation with a historian who has made a career studying how leaders govern through crises, especially domestic opposition, sent a message that the packed room didn’t seem to miss.
Near the end of the session, Goodwin said that the one thing that all the presidents he has studied have in common is personality. “What is personality?” she asked. “A combination of qualities: humility, empathy, resilience, accountability, responsibility, building trust, and having ambition for something bigger than yourself.”
She said that’s what history has asked of leaders and what this moment will continue to demand.
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