On the wall behind Amy K. Dacey’s desk at American University—amidst hundreds of campaign buttons and other mementos of a 30-year career that has spanned the highest levels of American politics—are two gold, ornamental keys to the city of Auburn, New York.
To the casual observer, they might look like standard civic awards—the kind handed out at rotary club luncheons or town anniversaries. But to Dacey, SPA/MA ’95, executive director of the Sine Institute of Policy and Politics and the Democracy Innovation Lab, they are a physical manifestation of the philosophy that now defines her life’s work.
Mayor Tim Lattimore, a Republican, presented Dacey with the first key to her hometown in 2005. She had been working for Senator John Kerry’s (D-MA) leadership PAC at the time, deep in the trenches of Democratic strategy, yet the mayor wanted to honor a local daughter who was making waves on the national stage. “We’re proud of you,” he told her. A decade later, a Democratic mayor, Michael Quill, awarded herthe same honor.
“People will joke, ‘Well, the Republican key looks a little bigger,’” she says, a twinkle in her eye. “But they work just the same.”
She laughs, but the symbolism is potent. In an era of hyperpolarization, where political identity eclipses community ties, Dacey holds the keys to both sides of the aisle. It is this rare capacity—to earn the respect of a Republican mayor while serving as the CEO of the Democratic National Committee, to bridge the divide between the “alphabet soup” of DC politics and the curious minds of college students—that she has brought home to AU.
As she spearheads the university’s ambitious new Democracy Innovation Lab, Dacey is no longer just chasing votes; she is chasing a solution to the fragility of democracy itself, using the one tool she has trusted since childhood: the conversation.
Dacey’s political education didn’t take root in a lecture hall or a Senate cloakroom. It began in a living room in upstate New York, where she was, as she tells it, “tricked” into public service.
When Dacey was eight years old, her father ran for the local school board. He framed her help with the campaign not as a choice, but as a quintessential childhood experience. “He told me that all kids went to party meetings and knocked on doors every weekend,” Dacey recalls.
It wasn’t until later that she realized her friends were watching TV while she was learning the mechanics of retail politics. But the trick had a lasting effect. Dacey grew up in a household where the Sunday dinner table conversation was inseparable from civic duty. Her mother was an activist, her father, a local party leader. They lived in “prime yard sign space” in Auburn, a small town where politics was personal—but rarely poisonous.
“We were friends with Republicans,” she says. “You didn’t always know [which party] your neighbors were [affiliated with.] You knew they owned the car wash or the grocery store. You had to get along with them because the community had to work.”
That community cohesion was tested, and Dacey’s resolve hardened, during her junior year of high school when her father ran for county legislator. The family machine sprang into action—door-knocking and sign-planting. On election night, Dacey sat ready to celebrate, convinced victory was inevitable.
Her father lost.
By five votes.
The number is seared into Dacey’s memory. “You can get all psychological, but I have always chased those five votes,” she says. “I learned very young what five votes can do. When people say every vote matters, I believe it.”
The loss didn’t embitter the family—it galvanized them. Her parents didn’t stop working for the party. They didn’t stop petitioning for better traffic safety on their street. They taught Dacey that losing an election didn’t mean the work was done. “There’s always the next fight,” her father told her.
It was a lesson in resilience that would serve her well in the volatile world of DC politics.
Dacey arrived in Washington in fall 1993, a “bright and shiny” 21-year-old driving a U-Haul down to graduate school at AU. She lived on Tunlaw Road in Northwest, intimidated by the big city but captivated by its pulse.
“I remember my dad saying, ‘When you drive around and it loses that awe, you might want to move on,’” she says.
Thirty-two years later, the awe hasn’t faded. She still walks the National Mall with her dog, Birdie, admiring the monuments to history and the grand, marble buildings where the future is being written.
It is a long way from where she started. Karen Grube, SIS/MA ’94, likes to tease that she hired Dacey for her very first DC gig: a cashier at the AU Campus Store.
“Even back then, you could tell she had the sharp mind, leadership skills, and unfailing can-do attitude that would make her so effective,” says Grube. “Amy was unflappable during the semester-start chaos, kept her coworkers and fellow students laughing, and brought a natural sense of order to everything she touched. Looking back, the talent was always there; I just had the privilege of seeing it early.”
That talent turned into a career that reads like a masterclass in political climbing—though Dacey describes it more like a game of dominoes.
After the Campus Store, the AU Career Center helped her land a role at the National Foundation for Women Legislators. From there, the dominoes fell quickly. She returned to New York to help run a campaign for Democratic Representative Maurice Hinchey—living with a great-aunt who kept her fed and laundered amidst the chaos of the trail—before catching the eye of Representative Louise Slaughter. The giant of New York politics hired Dacey after a single interview: “You’re good enough for Maurice—can you start on Monday?”
Dacey’s resume soon became a blur of acronyms. She served as the deputy political director for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), worked at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), and joined the Democratic National Committee (DNC). She was the traveling political director for Massachusetts Senator John Kerry’s presidential campaign, traversing the country from “Sea to Shining Sea”—as the 21-state trek was dubbed—learning to pack a suitcase to accommodate three different climates in a single week.
“I’ve been to all 50 states,” she says. “And the majority of them were not because I was vacationing.”
Through it all, she learned that the caricature of Washington as a swamp of cutthroat backstabbers was incomplete. To Dacey, politics was about relationships. It was a small world where the campaign manager you competed against in one cycle became your colleague in the next. “I’m a better person because I can have a conversation with someone I don’t agree with,” she says.
Dacey, then at the DNC, recalls going to breakfast with her counterpart at the Republican National Committee, even as their press shops issued blistering statements against each other. “We were the only two people in the country that had that job,” she says. “There’s an understanding there.”
It was this philosophy—that you can disagree on the path but agree on the destination—that she brought with her to American University in 2019.
After her tenure at the DNC and a stint in the corporate world, Dacey took a fellowship at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. It was a respite—a chance to engage with young people and step off the treadmill of election cycles. When AU listed a position for executive director of the newly founded Sine Institute of Policy and Politics, a friend called her: “They just posted your dream job.”
“I knew I wanted to come home; I wanted to work with young people,” Dacey recalls. “Campaigns and government are about the problem right in front of you—the next bill, the next campaign. I saw this opportunity to work on long-term infrastructure-type challenges.”
The institute was established with a $10 million gift from trustee Jeff Sine, SIS/BA ’76, and his wife, Samira, leveraging AU’s DC location to promote bipartisan solutions to the most pressing challenges of our time. A cornerstone of this mission is the fellowship program, which brings distinguished leaders in politics, journalism, business, the arts, and nonprofits to campus for a semester.
Dacey looked at Sine like a start-up—but within an established institution: “I know how to roll up my sleeves, find the paper clips, and build the Excel spreadsheets,” she says. Dacey tapped her Rolodex to bring former governors, cabinet secretaries, presidential speechwriters, journalists, philanthropists, artists, and more to campus as fellows and established a student advisory board to ensure the institute wasn’t just talking at students but listening to them.
“Amy is a visionary leader,” says Anita McBride, director of AU’s First Ladies Initiative and one of Dacey’s longtime collaborators. “Working with her and the Sine Institute has been one of the most professionally rewarding chapters in my career. Amy’s creativity, can-do philosophy, integrity, and dedication to elevating a wide range of voices make every collaboration meaningful. At the Sine Institute, we don’t just study leadership—we model it, together.”
The institute was just hitting its stride when the world stopped. In March 2020, less than a year after Dacey started, the pandemic forced the university to close. In 24 hours, the Sine Institute moved from seminars in Kerwin Hall to a fully virtual operation.
But in crisis, Dacey found opportunity. By moving online, the institute’s programming became accessible to alumni, international students, and the broader community. “Alumni have said to me, ‘I felt isolated, but I would sit down at noon, make my lunch, and watch a Sine program.’”
The pandemic reinforced the importance of the institute’s mission. During a time of uncertainty, the need for connection and civil discourse became more urgent than ever. Dacey and her team doubled down, creating the Reimagining the American Dream youth poll and expanding their reach.
Now, nearly seven years into her tenure, Dacey is pivoting again. In October, AU launched the Democracy Innovation Lab at the Sine Institute, with Dacey at the helm.
The lab is a hub for civic education and civil discourse, housing the Sine Institute, President Jon Alger’s Civic Life initiative, and the Civic Learning and Democracy Engagement Coalition. It represents an evolution of Dacey’s original vision: a move from a singular institute to a campus-wide—and potentially nationwide—movement.
The lab is meant to be a catalyst, a coordinating force; it aims to elevate the civic work happening in every corner of the university, from the School of Public Affairs, where Dacey studied political science, to the Kogod School of Business, to the arts and sciences.
“It’s naive for any industry to think they can separate themselves from politics,” Dacey says. “If you’re in the physics program and the deputy administrator of NASA comes in and starts talking about policy, there’s a connection there.”
The “lab” moniker is intentional—it suggests experimentation, a place to test ideas and see what works. As the country approaches its semiquincentennial, the lab will be an important partner in the university’s new 250+ at American initiative.
In November, the Sine Institute unveiled its eighth cohort of fellows and distinguished lecturers—the biggest group yet. All 11 experts will present programming “on critical topics related to America’s past, present, and future,” says Dacey, including civic education and voting rights.
“We always talk about the great experiment that is our democracy,” she says. So what better place than a lab to “tackle the challenges and opportunities of the next 250 years?”
On November 10, the lab also hosted its inaugural Solution Summit, a daylong symposium exploring the intersection of education, artificial intelligence, and civic life. The second annual summit, October 8, will showcase the work of all the 250+ at American Fellows and Distinguished Lecturers.
It’s an ambitious undertaking, but for Dacey, it’s simply the next logical step in a life spent organizing.
Despite the high-minded rhetoric of “innovation” and “solutions,” Dacey remains grounded in the reality of the work. She calls herself an “optimist without illusions.”
“You can get jaded doing this for as long as I have,” she admits. “There are a lot of losses. There are a lot of times you feel like, ‘We already fought that fight.’”
That’s where the students come in. Dacey draws her energy from the “zero to fives”—the students and recent graduates who haven’t yet learned what is impossible. She sees them in the Sine Institute’s lounge, debating with former governors or designing poll questions that stump the experts.
“They see what’s possible.” she says. “And it’s important for me to be reminded of that too.”
Caleb Brown, SPA-SOC/MA ’24, one of her first graduate assistants at the institute, says that investment is mutual. “Working with Amy provided me with much more than just a part-time gig,” Brown says. “It gave me continued mentorship, community, and insight. Amy wants you to succeed and is always there for you. I’m glad to have been on her team—and know that she’s always on mine.”
Dacey tells the story of a Sine Institute event in July 2024 that brought together the heads of the National College Republicans and National College Democrats. The premise was simple: On what do you agree? The students found common ground not on specific policies, but on the desire for young people to be empowered and safe. They became friends.
“We’ve [facilitated] a lot of those conversations,” Dacey says proudly.
She might have traded the frenetic pace of campaign cycles for the academic calendar, but the urgency remains. The five votes Dacey chased as a young campaign manager have evolved into a mandate to shape the next generation of leaders—and to ensure that “young people see public service and governing as a noble calling.”
In her office, the framed keys to Auburn gleam under the lights—one from the left, one from the right, both opening the same door. They are a reminder that while she has traveled to all 50 states and walked the halls of power, the most important work is often local, personal, and built on the simple, radical act of listening to your neighbor—even if you don’t know who they voted for.
“Decisions will be made on your behalf regardless,” Dacey says, echoing the advice she gives to students. “You might as well be involved in the system.”