Our workforce and our entire economy are strongest when we embrace diversity to its fullest, and that means opening doors of opportunity to everyone and recognizing that the American Dream excludes no one.

It stands to reason: Higher wages means higher loyalty and morale, which means higher productivity, which means a more profitable business.

Every day should be Labor Day. We have to fight for the basic proposition that apprenticeship is a wonderful ticket to the middle class. When we're fighting for things like paid leave, America is the only industrialized nation on the planet that doesn't have some form of paid leave - these are not bold ideas elsewhere in the world.

The typical minimum wage earner is a provider and a breadwinner - most likely a woman - responsible for paying bills, running a household and raising children.

I'm optimistic about our future as a party. It's about winning. The Democratic Party, if I had to do one word: winning. We need to win elections, because one thing I've learned is that when Democrats win good things happen to a lot of folks, and when we don't do so hot, we see a lot of chaos and carnage.

One of the things the Democratic Party is trying to do is take the word off-year out of our lexicon, because we've tended to be an accordion as a party. We expand in the presidentials; we shrink in between; and we scratch our head and wonder why we lose midterms.

I firmly believe that the Democrats' message of inclusion and opportunity resonates everywhere. When we talk about health care as a right and not a privilege, and the impact of the repeal efforts, that resonates everywhere, because everybody in every ZIP code has benefited in one way, shape or form, and frankly, in terms of under-performance, I think we have all too frequently tended to take some of our core constituencies for granted.