US Democratic Party Research Paper

1. Democratic-Republican Prelude

The distant origins of the Democratic party can be found in the governmental faction led by Secretary of State Jefferson at the outset of the new national government established by the 1787 Constitution. Serving under President George Washington, who persistently decried the emerging partisanship in his administration, Jefferson found himself consistently at odds with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton.

1.1 Jeffersonians vs. Hamiltonians

Their rivalry was rooted in personal ambition, policy, region, constituency representation, and ideology. Each aspired to inherit Washington’s mantle of national leadership. On behalf of his rural, agrarian, common constituents, Jefferson opposed Hamilton’s policy initiatives that favored the urban, commercial, affluent interests in society. Jefferson’s understanding of the proper role of the national government was much more limited than Hamilton’s expansive, energetic one.

More specifically, Jefferson and his followers tended to distrust executive and judicial power, even as the Hamiltonians, or Federalists, as they called them-selves, embraced it. Rather, the Jeffersonians exalted the legislature, with its clearer popular links, within the separation of power structure of the federal government, in contrast with the more elitist Federalists. As such, their pioneering partisan institution was the legislative caucus, a gathering of the congressional representatives loyal to Jefferson. The caucus plotted legislative strategy and assumed responsibility for presidential nominations.

When Washington, partisan disclaimers notwithstanding, generally embraced Hamilton’s policy initiatives, Jefferson extended his partisan opposition beyond the legislative caucus to the electoral arena in an effort to assume control of the national government. His organizational vehicle was the Democratic-Republican party. Meanwhile, this initiative encouraged Hamilton similarly to organize his Federalist faction within the government into a political party.

1.2 Democratic-Republican Dominance (1800–24)

As the nineteenth century dawned, Jefferson’s election to the presidency, accompanied by victories of supportive majorities in both houses of Congress, signaled the ascendancy of the Democratic-Republican party, and the decline of its Federalist opposition. Under the Virginia Dynasty of Presidents Jefferson (1801–9), James Madison (1809–17), and James Monroe (1817–25), the Democratic-Republicans thoroughly dominated the political landscape.

1.3 Democratic-Republican Disarray (1824–8)

However, the looming presidential election of 1824 revealed serious divisions in the coalition of forces that comprised the Democratic-Republican party. The breakdown of consensus undermined the legitimacy of the legislative caucus’ presidential nomination and led to a split that produced a new partisan alignment and the appearance of the Democratic party. One faction flocked to the banner of Andrew Jackson in his unsuccessful 1824 presidential campaign and the two succeeding ones in which he prevailed. This Jackson faction became known as the Democrats, distinguishing themselves from Jackson’s rivals, including John Quincy Adams and Henry Clay, whose reconstituted factions became the Whig party.

2. The Jacksonian Democracy

The Democratic party, while clearly rooted in the old Democratic-Republican party, nonetheless demonstrated noteworthy shades of difference pertaining to region, class, religion, and ideology. It had strong appeal in the new southern and western states admitted to the Union. The Democrats also attracted support from urban workers whose heightened presence reflected increasing industrialization in American society. This constituency brought into the party coalition large numbers of Catholic immigrants. The Democrats more enthusiastically promoted the value of popular participation in the political arena. In 1832, they supplanted the discredited caucus with the presidential nominating convention. Following Jackson’s lead, they tended to be more comfortable with the exercise of executive prerogative, linking the presidency with the public.

2.1 Democrats vs. Whigs (1828–56)

In this second distinctive era of party competition, lasting over a quarter-century, the Democrats were clearly dominant on the national scene. Their Whig opponents united around their common opposition to the person and policies of Jackson, but they were divided otherwise. In addition to Jackson (1828, 1832), the Democrats also elected Martin Van Buren (1836), James K. Polk (1844), Franklin Pierce (1852), and James Buchanan (1856) to the presidency for single terms. On two occasions in the 1840s, they lost presidential elections when the Whigs nominated military heroes: William Henry Harrison (1840), and Zachary Taylor (1848). Unfortunately for the Whigs, both standard-bearers died before completing a single term, and the Democrats reclaimed the presidency in the ensuing elections.

For the most part, Democratic control of Congress was also the norm. On only one occasion, 1841–3, did the Democrats lack majorities in both houses. Twice they lost a single chamber: the Senate, 1843–5; and the House, 1847–9. Otherwise, from the late 1820s until the mid-1850s, the Democrats were clearly in charge on Capitol Hill. However, the intensifying slavery controversy and rising sectionalism proved divisive and debilitating for both major political parties in the decade of the 1850s. Indeed, the unstable Whig coalition disintegrated, and a new party, the Republicans, arose to challenge the fragmented Democrats for national dominance, winning control of the House in 1854 and 1858.

3. Democrats vs. Republicans I: Democrats In The Minority (1860–96)

With its Northern and Southern wings competing electorally, the Democrats were trounced in the 1860 elections, which produced a Republican president, Abraham Lincoln, Republican congressional majorities, and a new, third era of party competition, in which the Democrats found themselves in an un-accustomed position as the minority party. During the Civil War, the Democrats floundered following the departure of their traditionally strong Southern wing to secession. They held on as the major party alternative to the now-dominant Republicans with their support in the urban strongholds of the Northeast. After the war, the return of the solidly Democratic Southern states to the Union revived party fortunes, but the Democrats continued to suffer nationally from the stigmas of their longtime accommodation of slavery and acquiescence to secession.

For more than three decades following the outbreak of the Civil War, the Democrats typically lost presidential elections, albeit by narrow margins. Only Grover Cleveland, in 1884 and 1892, was able to break the Republican lock on the White House. In turn, only two Congresses in these decades featured Democratic majorities in both chambers: the 46th (1879–81), and the 53rd (1893–5). The Democrats were much more competitive in the lower house, winning control on six additional occasions: 1874, 1876, 1882, 1884, 1886, and 1890.

3.1 Democratic Factions

During this era, the Democrats became even more fragmented. Reinforcing their traditional sectional division, with its attendant urban–rural dimension, they separated into persistent dueling factions that featured Protestants vs. Catholics, protectionists vs. free traders, wets and drys, populists and progressives vs. reactionaries and states-righters, and hard money and easy money advocates.

4. Democrats V. Republicans II: Democratic Downturn (1896–1932)

The critical election of 1896 marked a severe downturn in Democratic party fortunes. Their presidential nominee, William Jennings Bryan, represented the ascendant Southern and Western, rural, Protestant, populist, easy money, free trade, dry factions within the party. He went down to a crushing defeat at the hands of Republican William McKinley. Renominated in 1900 and 1908, Bryan continued to lead the party to electoral disasters, as the new pattern of national electoral competition solidified. In this fourth party system, lasting until 1932, the Democrats maintained their base in the South, and did relatively well in the West, but were usually overwhelmed by the Republicans in the more populous Northeast and Midwest, despite their enduring urban strongholds there.

Their entrenched minority status was interrupted in the twentieth century’s second decade. In 1910, the Democrats won a majority in the House. Two years later, division within the dominant Republican party allowed nominee Woodrow Wilson to capture the presidency, and the Democrats to control both houses of Congress for the first time in two decades. Wilson’s narrow 1916 re-election was the first by an incumbent Democrat since Jackson’s in 1832, but the Democrats relinquished both congressional chambers in the midterm elections of 1918. The ‘return to normalcy’ was completed by the loss of the White House to the resurgent Republicans in 1920. The Democrats suffered convincing electoral defeats in the remaining national elections of that decade.

5. Democrats vs. Republicans III: Democratic Resurgence (1932–52)

However, the onset of the Great Depression in 1929 signaled a revival in party fortunes, catapulting the Democrats back to majority status nationwide. Franklin D. Roosevelt, their successful presidential nominee in 1932, played the leading role in this electoral realignment, justifying his inclusion with Jefferson and Jackson in the top echelon of party heroes. Roosevelt assembled a formidable electoral coalition under the party umbrella. It embraced white Southerners, urban workers, farmers, racial and ethnic minorities, and ideological liberals, who united behind the activist governmental response to economic and social problems embodied in Roosevelt’s New Deal. Roosevelt effectively reconciled Hamilton’s energetic founding vision for the Federalists with the Democrats’ traditional, antielitist identity as the party of the people.

This coalition elected Roosevelt president an unprecedented four times, and kept his successor, Harry S. Truman, in the White House for another full term, encompassing an epochal two decades that featured not only the Depression, but also World War II and the onset of the Cold War. In addition, the Democrats took control of the House of Representatives in 1930 and the Senate in 1932. They held both through 1946, and recaptured the Congress in 1948. Thus, the Roosevelt coalition, mobilized in support of his New Deal policies, dominated this fifth distinctive era of party competition,

6. Democrats Vs. Republicans IV: Fluctuating Fortunes (1952– )

In the five decades since Truman’s 1948 triumph, the national electoral fortunes of the Democrats have fluctuated dramatically and generally deteriorated. They lost the White House and Congress as well in 1952, when the Republicans nominated General Dwight D. Eisenhower, a World War II hero. How-ever, they recaptured control of Congress in 1954. Having done so, they controlled the House for an unprecedented 40 consecutive years and the Senate for 26.

This sustained Democratic dominance of Congress masked a much more vulnerable position in presidential elections. After two terms for Eisenhower, the Democrats regained the presidency under John Kennedy in 1960 and retained it for his successor Lyndon Johnson in 1964. They surrendered the White House in 1968, when Republican Richard Nixon won his first of two terms. Scandals associated with the Nixon presidency enabled Democrat Jimmy Carter to defeat Nixon’s replacement, Gerald R. Ford, in 1976. However, Carter met defeat in his 1980 reelection bid against Ronald Reagan. That election also featured the Democrats’ loss of the Senate for the first time in over a quarter-century.

Throughout Reagan’s two terms, the Democrats held on to their majority in the House, and they took back the Senate in 1986. Nevertheless, their weakness in presidential contests was unmistakable. In 1988, Reagan’s vice president, George Bush, won the presidency, marking the first time since 1928 that the Democrats lost three consecutive presidential elections.

Uniting behind nominee Bill Clinton in 1992, the Democrats finally recaptured the White House; but two years later, they lost both houses of Congress for the first time in four decades. In 1996, Clinton won re-election, the first Democrat since Roosevelt to do so. In turn, the Republicans have maintained their control of Congress at least through 2000, marking the longest stretch the Democrats have constituted the minority since the 1920s.

6.1 Erosion Of The New Deal Coalition

The past five decades of volatility in Democratic party fortunes reveal serious erosion in the New Deal coalition. Most notably, the Democrats have lost the allegiance of the white Southerners who had been a party bulwark since the days of Jefferson and Jackson. When the national Democrats embraced the cause of civil rights in the late 1940s, they set the stage for a regional realignment that was clearly underway by the mid-1960s and has continued through the century’s end.

In addition, even as their social and economic reforms became widely accepted, the Democrats suffered electorally from rising public distrust of the national government and its capacity to solve social problems. Moreover, the advent of the Cold War led to criticism of the Democrats as ‘soft’ on communism, undermining their voter support on foreign policy issues. Intraparty conflict over the Vietnam War and the attendant cultural divisions it spawned further weakened the Democrats. Further, both major parties struggle with the disinclination of contemporary voters to develop enduring partisan attachments.

7. Organization And Leadership

The Democratic Party is organized according to the federal principle, in keeping with the constitutional structure of government under which it developed. Thus, at every level of government, national, state, and local, there is a corresponding level of party organization. Traditionally, decentralization prevailed within the party organization, with the state and local parties maintaining noteworthy autonomy. Party reforms beginning in the late 1960s ushered in an era of unprecedented nationalization, as well as an enhancement of the role of primaries in presidential nominations. The organization of the Democratic party, at any level, typically features several distinct institutions: convention, committee, chair, and headquarters staff.

Traditionally, the party’s presidential nominee is designated its titular leader. When that nominee occupies the presidency, party leadership is indisputable. Otherwise, it may also be claimed by the congressional chieftains, the national party chair, and, occasionally, incumbent governors of major states.

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