Democratic Party

I

Introduction

Democratic Party, one of the two main political parties of the United States. Its origins can be traced to the coalition formed behind Thomas Jefferson in the 1790s to resist the policies of the administration of George Washington. This coalition, originally called the Republican Party, and later the Democratic-Republican Party, split into two factions during the presidential campaign of 1828. One, the National Republican Party, was absorbed into the Whig Party in 1834; the other became the Democratic Party. In the 1830s, under presidents Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, the Democratic Party developed the characteristics it retained until the end of the century. It was willing to use national power in foreign affairs when American interests were threatened, but in economic and social policy it stressed the responsibility of government to act cautiously, if at all. The party's supporters all had in common a dislike of government intervention in their lives. The Democrats' opponents, the Whigs, on the other hand, believed in using governmental power to promote, regulate, correct, and reform.

II

Civil War and Opposition

The Democrats won the presidency six out of eight times from 1828 to 1856 and usually controlled Congress. A voter backlash related to slavery and other issues severely changed the party's fortunes in the mid-1850s. In an electoral disaster, many northern Democrats, seeking to punish their leaders and willing to throw aside their party, joined the emerging Republican Party. The party split in 1860, enabling the Republicans under Abraham Lincoln to win the presidency. The party's problems were compounded during the American Civil War that followed, when the Democrats opposed wartime government exactions on principle, and were charged with disloyalty. They did not regain control of either house of Congress until 1874 and did not win the presidency again until 1884. The South became an increasingly solid Democratic voting bloc. Between the American Civil War and the Great Depression six decades later the Democrats were the minority party in the nation, able to win only when the Republicans were badly split, and they themselves split badly in the 1890s.

At the beginning of the 20th century the Progressive split in Republican ranks helped elect Woodrow Wilson twice, but the entry of the United States into World War I ended that. The war, popular at first, backfired against the Wilson administration, and the result was another Republican landslide in 1920.

III

From Roosevelt to the 1980s

In the mid-20th century, however, the basic character of the Democratic Party changed to a party of vigorous government intervention in the economy and in the social realm, willing to regulate and redistribute wealth and to protect those least able to help themselves in an increasingly complex society. The Great Depression after 1929 and the coming to power of Franklin D. Roosevelt, with his New Deal, solidified and expanded this new commitment.

Increasingly, under Democratic leadership, the government expanded its role in social welfare and economic regulation. Roosevelt became an even more powerful symbol than Jackson had been, winning four successive terms, and the Democrats controlled Congress in all but 4 of the 48 years between 1933 and 1981.

The Democrats regained the presidency with the election of John F. Kennedy in 1960 and passed much vigorous legislation, culminating in the Great Society policies of President Lyndon Johnson.

The Vietnam War provoked many within the party to challenge it on its anti-communist foreign policy, which had directly led to involvement in Vietnam. The party bounced back after the excesses of the Republican presidency of Richard Nixon and the tapering off of the fervour induced by the war. The nomination of a southerner, Jimmy Carter, in 1976 secured a Democratic presidency, but only temporarily. Landslide victories by Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan over Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984 further wounded the Democrats, but the party rebounded in 1986 to take control of the United States Senate, which had been in Republican hands for six years.

IV

The 1990s and into the 21st Century

The party made further gains in 1990, and led by two southerners, Bill Clinton and Al Gore, recaptured the presidency in 1992. However, the 1994 Congressional elections delivered a crushing verdict on two years of Democratic government. Despite this breakthrough for the Republicans, they were unable to field a convincing alternative to Clinton for the 1996 presidential elections, and Clinton was safely re-elected in November 1996. Over the next four years the Clinton presidency presided over the longest economic expansion in the nation’s history, and saw its biggest ever federal budget deficit transformed into its largest ever surplus.

However, in what was a return to conservative values and a reaction to the supposed moral failure of the later years of the Clinton presidency (he had survived an acrimonious and partisan impeachment process in 1999), George W. Bush won the 2000 presidential election for the Republican Party in the closest ballot ever. Although Al Gore actually won the popular vote nationwide, he failed to gain the requisite number of electoral college votes. The popularity of the Republican Party’s conservative values meant that the Democrats suffered further defeat in the 2004 presidential election, with Bush retaining the presidency with victory over Democrat candidate John Kerry, a senator from Massachusetts. Yet a voter backlash in the 2006 Congressional elections against the US involvements in Afghanistan and Iraq (see War on Iraq), as part of the so-called “war on terror”, saw the Democrats wrest control of both the Senate and the House of Representatives from the Republicans.