Democratic Party (1832–)

The modern Democratic Party is the oldest political organization in the United States. It is a direct descendant of the political movement surrounding Andrew Jackson's rise to the presidency in the 1820s, with a lineage that reaches back to Thomas Jefferson and the nation's earliest days. There remain some threads that connect the Democratic Party of the early twenty-first century to that of the party's founders long ago, such as a shared advocacy of the laboring classes. In many ways, however, today's party is so different from its forebears that they might as well be different parties altogether.

The party founded as the voice of agrarian Americans shifted its base to the nation's urban centers. The party born as a reaction by states' rights advocates against the strong central government advocated by the Federalist Party shifted profoundly, especially since President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal era of the 1930s, to embrace an activist federal government. The party willing to secede and go to war in the South to defend slavery in the nineteenth century—and which for many years after the Civil War carried the banner of segregation in the South—adopted the cause of minority rights in the midtwentieth century and today receives strong support from black voters. Meanwhile, the party's overall shift to liberalism at the national leadership level turned the Democrats' “Solid South” into the party's weakest region, as an increasingly conservative Republican Party attracted southern voters.

The South's withdrawal from the historically powerful but tenuous Democratic coalition caused setbacks for the party beginning in the late 1960s. From the 1968 through 2008 elections, Republicans won seven of eleven presidential races, and they broke the Democrats' lock on Congress by winning control of both chambers in 1994 and holding on for most of the next dozen years. A series of debates over the “soul” of the Democratic Party pitted the party's mainly liberal base—including (to varying degrees) blacks, Hispanics, Jews, and other ethnic minorities, as well as feminists and gay rights advocates, who wanted the party to express a clear “progressive” agenda—against Democratic centrists, represented by groups such as the now-defunct democratic leadership council, who argued that the party's liberal image was costing it elections. The Democratic congressional and presidential victories in 2006 and 2008 shifted the party toward a more vigorous progressive agenda, especially in the House under the leadership of Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, an unapologetic liberal voice. However, the party suffered massive losses in the 2010 midterm elections, especially in the House, which returned control to the GOP. The size of the losses, and President Barack Obama's generally centrist positions, raised new questions about the party's political path in the near-term future.

Yet the party's losses in the South and other conservative regions have been largely offset by a counter realignment. Even with losses in the 2010 election, the party's dominance is growing in New England, the one-time bastion of Yankee Republicanism, and it has gained majority status in populous states such as New York, California, and Illinois, where Republicans until not long ago were highly competitive. Further, the Democrats have made incursions into affluent suburban areas, where the Republicans' attachment to the social conservative movement has worn down the GOP's traditional appeal.

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