When are elections won? The obvious answer is on Election Day.

But many races are effectively decided months earlier, when voters make their choices in the primaries. Some are shaped even earlier, when party leaders, donors and interest groups recruit candidates to run in the first place.

That often leads to heated arguments within the party, as different factions put forward competing theories of how to win.

We’re watching that play out among Democrats right now. Some argue that the party needs more progressives to energize its base. Others say it needs moderates who can win back center-right voters turned off by President Donald Trump. Still others believe the key is finding candidates who can reconnect with working-class voters or bring male voters back into the fold.

Establishment or insurgent? Democratic insider or democratic socialist? Polished or “authentic”?

I understand the impulse. I have been inside campaign war rooms where decisions were made about strategy, spending and messaging. I have been there when campaigns won, and when they lost. I have also stood outside, organizing and agitating the campaigns to pay better attention to the communities they are overlooking.

Inside a campaign room, voters can start to look like targets, percentages and turnout goals.

Those experiences taught me that the view changes depending on where you stand. Inside a campaign room, voters can start to look like targets, percentages and turnout goals. Outside that room, they are people asking whether anybody sees them at all. Then the election comes, and the decision is made by a much wider group of people.

That is why I am skeptical of anyone speaking with absolute certainty about what voters should want, particularly people who have never won a race, lost one, built an organization or assembled an electoral coalition. I am equally wary of Democrats treating insight into Republican voters as expertise on the Democratic electorate.

Here is the reality: There is no single perfect Democratic candidate because there is no single Democratic coalition. The candidate who can build a majority in Wisconsin may not be the candidate who can win in Mississippi. The candidate who can win this year may not be the candidate who can win two or four years from now. And the candidate who seems like a sure thing in March may look very different in October.

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That doesn’t mean Democrats lack direction. A national party should have common values. But shared values do not require identical candidates, identical messages or identical coalitions in every race.

When an election is over, Democrats should study it, but they shouldn’t treat it as a blueprint. Politics is not a hard science, and the big lesson from one race may be the wrong one to take for a different election.

That is where the Democratic Party apparatus comes in. As I wrote in my first book, “No, You Shut Up,” the apparatus is the machine that makes the party function. It recruits candidates, directs resources and helps determine which campaigns receive institutional support. Its job is not to impose one theory across the country. Its job is to take the party’s values, understand the electorate in front of it and help build the campaign that particular race requires.

Once a nominee emerges, the task is to hold that coalition together and expand it. That requires sustained communication, organizing and attention. Democrats need independents and, in some races, Republican crossover voters. But expansion means addition, not substitution.

Mississippi shows why.

The Senate race there is not receiving the attention given to more conventional battlegrounds in Maine, Michigan and Ohio. But last November, Democrats flipped three Republican-held seats in the Mississippi legislature, including two that broke the GOP’s state Senate supermajority.

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Fairer districts created an opening. But candidates, organizers and voters turned that opening into power.

That electorate did not suddenly appear when the Democratic candidate for Senate, Scott Colom, entered the race. The organizing and infrastructure were already there, and Mississippi voters had already shown that change was possible, even in a deep-red state.

Colom is an elected district attorney rooted in the electorate he is asking to represent. He is now challenging Republican Sen. Cindy Hyde-Smith.

The race will be difficult. But difficult is not impossible, and overlooked is not unwinnable.

The Mississippi race deserves attention, but the larger lesson is not about one state or candidate. It is about the limits of certainty. Democrats do not need an answer for every campaign. They need the discipline to look clearly at the race in front of them.

A party that starts pursuing the same strategy everywhere will lose winnable races. A party that believes a single kind of candidate is the only one to nominate will do that in areas where it won’t work. And a party that banishes the factions with an alternative view on things will shrink and stagnate.

Disagreement about the formula for winning is not a problem. The problem is believing that there’s a formula at all.

For more thought-provoking insights from Michael Steele, Symone Sanders Townsend and Luke Russert, watch “The Weeknight” every Monday-Friday at 7 p.m. ET on MS NOW.