Democratic Party | |
---|---|
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Chairperson | Ken Martin |
Governing body | Democratic National Committee[1][2] |
Senate Minority Leader | Chuck Schumer |
House Minority Leader | Hakeem Jeffries |
Founders | |
Founded | January 8, 1828[3] Baltimore, Maryland, U.S. |
Preceded by | Democratic-Republican Party |
Headquarters | 430 South Capitol St. SE, Washington, D.C., U.S. |
Student wing | |
Youth wing | Young Democrats of America |
Women's wing | National Federation of Democratic Women |
Overseas wing | Democrats Abroad |
Ideology | |
Political position | Center-left[19] |
Caucuses | Blue Dog Coalition New Democrat Coalition Congressional Progressive Caucus |
Colors | Blue |
Senate | 45 / 100[a] |
House of Representatives | 213 / 435 |
State governors | 23 / 50 |
State upper chambers | 832 / 1,973 |
State lower chambers | 2,385 / 5,413 |
Territorial governors | 2 / 5 |
Seats in Territorial upper chambers | 21 / 97 |
Seats in Territorial lower chambers | 9 / 91 |
Election symbol | |
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Website | |
democrats | |
The Democratic Party is one of the two major political parties in the United States. It was founded in 1828, making it the world's oldest active political party. Its main rival since the 1850s has been the Republican Party, and the two have since dominated American politics.
The Democratic Party was founded in 1828 from remnants of the Democratic-Republican Party. Senator Martin Van Buren played the central role in building the coalition of state organizations which formed the new party as a vehicle to help elect Andrew Jackson as president that year. It initially supported Jacksonian democracy, agrarianism, and geographical expansionism, while opposing a national bank and high tariffs. Democrats won six of the eight presidential elections from 1828 to 1856, losing twice to the Whigs. In 1860, the party split into Northern and Southern factions over slavery. After the American Civil War, blacks were enfranchised in southern states and Republicans were in power. During this Reconstruction the majority of white Southerners supported the Democrats. By 1877 they "redeemed" the region and it became the Solid South and nearly always voted for Democrats. The great majority of Blacks were disenfranchised by 1905. It remained dominated by agrarian interests, contrasting with Northern Republican support for the big business of the Gilded Age. Democratic candidates won the presidency only twice[b] between 1860 and 1908, though they won the popular vote two more times in that period. During the Progressive Era, most factions of the party supported progressive reforms, electing Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson president in 1912 and 1916.
In 1932, Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president after campaigning on a strong response to the Great Depression. His New Deal programs created a broad Democratic coalition which united White southerners, Northern workers, labor unions, African Americans, Catholic and Jewish communities, progressives, and liberals. From the late 1930s, a conservative minority in the party's Southern wing joined with Republicans to slow and stop further progressive domestic reforms.[20] After the civil rights movement and Great Society era of progressive legislation under Lyndon B. Johnson, who was often able to overcome the conservative coalition in the 1960s, many White southerners switched to the Republican Party as the Northeastern states became more reliably Democratic.[21][22] The party's labor union element has weakened since the 1970s amid deindustrialization, and during the 1980s it lost many White working-class voters to the Republicans under Ronald Reagan. The election of Bill Clinton in 1992 marked a shift for the party toward centrism and the Third Way, shifting its economic stance toward market-based policies.[23][24][25] Barack Obama oversaw the party's passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.[26]
In the 21st century, the Democratic Party's strongest demographics are urban voters, college graduates (especially those with graduate degrees),[27] African Americans, women, younger voters, irreligious voters, the unmarried and LGBTQ people.[28] On social issues, it advocates for abortion rights,[29] LGBT rights,[30] action on climate change,[31] and the legalization of marijuana.[32] On economic issues, the party favors healthcare reform, paid sick leave and supporting unions.[33][34][35][36] In foreign policy, the party supports liberal internationalism as well as tough stances against China and Russia.[37][38][39]
For 171 years, [the Democratic National Committee] has been responsible for governing the Democratic Party
The Democratic National Committee shall have general responsibility for the affairs of the Democratic Party between National Conventions
sarnold
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
Suffice to say that there has not been a huge swing away from the center since the 1970s.
What are we to make of American parties at the dawn of the twenty-first century? ... The impact of the 1960s civil rights revolution has been to create two more ideologically coherent parties: a generally liberal or center-left party and a conservative party.
Including the American Democratic Party in a comparative analysis of center-left parties is unorthodox, since unlike Europe, America has not produced a socialist movement tied to a strong union movement. Yet the Democrats may have become center-left before anyone else, obliged by their different historical trajectory to build complex alliances with social groups other than the working class and to deal with unusually powerful capitalists ... Taken together, the three chapters devoted to the United States show that the center-left in America faces much the same set of problems as elsewhere and, especially in light of the election results from 2008, that the Democratic Party's potential to win elections, despite its current slide in approval, may be at least equal to that of any center-left party in Europe ... Despite the setback in the 2010 midterms, together the foregoing trends have put the Democrats in a position to eventually build a dominant center-left majority in the United States.
While these dynamics have remained have remained important to the Democratic Party's electoral strategy since the 1990s, the finance-driven coalition described above remains high controverisal and unstable, reflecting the fact that core intellectual and ideological tensions in the platform of the U.S. center-left persist.
We conclude by considering why Democrats have taken this course, why they are not perceived as having done so, and why, at this fraught juncture for American democratic capitalism, political scientists could learn much from closer examination of the rich world's largest center-left party.
It is clear that the Democratic Party—the center-left United States political party—does enact some forms of a redistributive economic policy agenda.
Hale-1995
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
Wills-1997
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
The statistic that best defines our politics over the past 20 years is this: Nine of the past ten national elections have resulted in a change in power in at least one chamber of Congress or the White House. (The sole outlier is 2012.) Several of those elections were considered at the time to be realignments that would lead to a sustained majority for one of the major parties. ... After Republicans defeated John Kerry in 2004 and snatched five Senate seats across the South, commentators believed social issues like gay marriage would set an unwinnable trap for Democrats. Hugh Hewitt wrote a book called Painting the Map Red, imagining a permanent conservative majority. Democrats then took the House and Senate in the 2006 midterms. When Barack Obama crushed John McCain in post–financial crisis 2008, Democratic pundits decided they had an enduring majority. The Tea Party thrashed them in 2010. The conventional wisdom was that Obama was toast; he won in 2012. Donald Trump's 2016 victory signaled a changed electorate, until Democrats won the House in 2018 and the presidency in 2020, only to lose both in 2022 and 2024.
In the data, men working without a college degree of every racial group have fallen well below the average full-time worker (women without a degree have long been at the bottom in income, and college-educated men have consistently been at the top). Workers in coastal states have seen the highest growth, while steep declines have been concentrated in parts of the Midwest that are also likely to decide the election this November.
In the corporate governance area, the center-left repositioned itself to press for reform. The Democratic Party in the United States used the postbubble scandals and the collapse of share prices to attack the Republican Party ... Corporate governance reform fit surprisingly well within the contours of the center-left ideology. The Democratic Party and the SPD have both been committed to the development of the regulatory state as a counterweight to managerial authority, corporate power, and market failure.
In the two decades that followed the Cold War's end, globalism gained ground over nationalism. Simultaneously, the rise of increasingly complex systems and networks—institutional, financial, and technological—overshadowed the role of the individual in politics. But in the early 2010s, a profound shift began. By learning to harness the tools of this century, a cadre of charismatic figures revived the archetypes of the previous one: the strong leader, the great nation, the proud civilization. ... They are self-styled strongmen who place little stock in rules-based systems, alliances, or multinational forums. They embrace the once and future glory of the countries they govern, asserting an almost mystical mandate for their rule. Although their programs can involve radical change, their political strategies rely on strains of conservatism, appealing over the heads of liberal, urban, cosmopolitan elites to constituencies animated by a hunger for tradition and a desire for belonging.
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