Our Party's History

Although Republicans like to call themselves the Grand Old Party, or GOP for short, the Democratic Party is grander and far older. In the early 1790s Alexander Hamilton founded the Federalist Party to support the re-election of John Adams, and supporters of Thomas Jefferson soon after formed the Democratic-Republican Party to promote Jefferson as the better alternative to Federalist President John Adams in the presidential election of 1800. While Federalists were strongest in New England and the larger cities in the Middle Atlantic region of the young country, the Democratic-Republicans had equal, or better, strength in the south and the more rural parts of the Mid-Atlantic states. The Federalists favored policies that would benefit businessmen and bankers, while the Democratic-Republicans were more representative of the agrarian population and were acknowledged as the party of the "common man", supporting individual rights over the rights of the elite.

After Jefferson's election victory over Adams in 1800, the Federalist Party began to go into decline, fielding its last presidential candidate (Rufus King) in 1820, and disappearing altogether shortly after, leaving the Democratic-Republican Party as the sole party of power until 1834. Indeed, the election of 1824 had four presidential candidates on the ballot, all Democratic-Republicans. The two main contenders in that election were John Quincy Adams, generally referred to by party insiders as "Quincy", and Andrew Jackson. Jackson was rightly seen as a supporter of the common man, while Quincy was favored by the aristocratic rich. Although Jackson had both the most popular and electoral votes, four candidates on the ballot resulted in nobody obtaining a majority in the electoral college, and so the outcome, per the 12th Amendment of the Constitution, was to be decided by the House of Representatives where the former President's son had stronger support, and thus was elected by that small body to become our young nation's 6th President.

Between 1824 and 1828 factions that had developed within the Democratic-Republican Party became deeper and more pronounced. Eventually, opponents of Jackson broke away altogether from the Democratic-Republican Party, founding a new party known as the Anti-Jacksonian Party and later changing their party's name to the National Republican Party (no direct relationship to today's Republican Party). To minimize confusion by voters, the remaining members of the Democratic-Republican Party dropped the "Republican" portion of their party's name and the party became known as simply the Democratic Party for the 1828 election. Historians point to that renaming as the beginning of what they often refer to as "the modern Democratic Party". With only one Democratic candidate and one Anti-Jacksonian candidate on the ballot, Jackson easily defeated Adams, getting more than double Adams' number of electoral votes. After the crushing defeat they endured in 1828 the Anti-Jacksonians soon disbanded their party, but many of them began referring to themselves as "Whigs", adopting the name of the English party that opposed the concept of an absolute monarchy in Great Britain. This was intended to be a jab a Jackson, who they felt acted more like a king than as a President.

Jackson's presidency solidified several positive positions of the Democratic Party, some of which endure to this day. However, there were other facets of Jackson and his party that we take no pride in. Jackson promoted the rights of the common man, especially farmers, and democracy, which endure within our party. On the darker side, Jackson's treatment of Native Americans was deplorable and he was a proponent of slavery. He advocated westward expansion, but wanted to push indigenous people out of their ancestral homelands to achieve that expansion and wanted the institution of slavery to be prevalent in the newly settled territories. So historically, he was a mixture of the very good and the very bad, but his positions were extremely popular in his day. In 1832 he won re-election easily over Anti-Jacksonian Henry Clay and two minor party candidates. When Jackson made it known that he would not be seeking a third term the Anti-Jacksonians no longer had a common enemy and their party disbanded, leaving the Democratic Party as the only major party.

Predictably, in 1834 many former Anti-Jacksonians, along with members of minor parties and some disaffected Democrats, joined together to formally establish the Whig Party. The Whigs fielded four candidates in 1836 but none could pull enough votes away from Jackson's Vice President, Martin Van Buren, to get the election thrown, once again, into the hands of the House of Representatives. They were able to win the Presidency in 1840 and again in 1848, but in both cases their successful candidates would die in office during their first term, and in both cases they were succeeded in office by Vice Presidents who were Whigs in name only. By 1850 both parties had become seriously factionalized by the issue of slavery. In the case of the Whigs, division within the party around that issue was so pronounced that it literally tore the party apart and the Whig Party disbanded shortly after the 1856 election..

In 1854 a new party was formed from remnants of the Whigs, members of a few minority parties and abolitionist Democrats. It was primarily based in the northeast quarter of the country, and was largely formed to be an abolitionist party. The new party, which called itself the Republican Party, competed against the Democratic Party and what remained of the Whig Party, coming in second place behind the dominant Democrats. Democrat James Buchanan would win the election of 1856, but he would be the last Democrat to reside in the White House until 1885.

Abraham Lincoln's election in 1860 put the Republican Party in control and sparked the Civil War. Much of the Democratic Party's base was in the southern states which would attempt to secede from the union, and southern politicians were essentially expelled from any government positions during Reconstruction. Eventually, the party would become a political force again in the nation, but they would not be a major player again until the election of 1884 when Grover Cleveland would win one term in office only to lose his re-election bid four years later. From that point on, power in the country would move back and forth between Democrats and Republicans until 1932 when Franklin Delano Roosevelt defeated Republican Herbert Hoover.

Hoover, and Republicans in general, had embraced an economic theory that Will Rogers famously called the "Trickle Down Theory". Referred to previously as "Horse and Sparrow Economics" (based on the assumption that if you feed a horse plenty of oats, the sparrows that follow the horse down the road will have plenty to eat) in essence, the theory says that if you enact policies that benefit the wealthy they will pay their workers better and the whole economy will thrive. Trickle Down Economics, more recently dubbed "Supply Side Economics", endures to this day as the economic policy of the Republican Party, but it didn't work for Hoover, who signed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act of 1930, which was one of the biggest contributing factors that brought about the Great Depression. Because of Trickle Down Economics, the Great Depression hit the poor and the middle class the hardest because little, if any, of the wealth of the aristocrats actually trickled down to anyone else. Average Americans turned out in droves in 1932 to support Franklin and the "New Deal" that he was promising and gave Roosevelt one of the biggest electoral victories in American history.

FDR's New Deal was enormously successful. It put nearly 13 million out-of-work Americans back to work building much of the infrastructure that we still have today. Schools, hospitals, paved roads, bridges, dams and much more served to modernize America and made what had been a largely second-class country into a modern world power. Elderly retirees, widows, orphans and the disabled were no longer completely dependent on their families for financial needs because Social Security had been put in place. Roosevelt was elected to an unprecedented third term, and then a fourth, but died in office less than three months after his fourth inauguration. During his three full terms Roosevelt modernized America and, prior to our own entry into WWII, supported our European allies in their fight against fascism with a "Lend-Lease" program to provide them with necessary military equipment. The United States officially joined the war effort in Europe and the Pacific Theatre after the attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Roosevelt quickly transformed our industrial base into a streamlined war machine, building planes, ships and tanks better and faster than anyone had previously imagined was possible.

Nobody will ever claim that the Democratic Party has always been perfect. In fact, prior to the Civil War it was largely the pro-slavery party. During and after Reconstruction, Democrats, particularly in the southern states, largely stood for racism and segregation. Although he, himself, was not racist, Roosevelt was unable to change that attitude in others. Democrats were largely split into two factions, with the dividing lines drawn largely along the lines of "for or against" calls for racial equality. Possibly Roosevelt's most redeeming feature was the fact that he was capable of bringing both sides of the racial equality issue together for the greater good of the country.

Upon FDR's death Vice President Harry Truman became President. Truman presided over the end of WWII, including the world's only use of nuclear weapons to bring the war in the Pacific to a much swifter conclusion, saving countless American and Japanese lives. Although Truman is usually overlooked in the history of civil rights in America, he was really one of the earliest civil rights advocates in the Democratic Party, which previously had once been the party that supported slavery and later segregation in the southern states. In 1948 Truman issued Executive Order 9981, which declared “that there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion or national origin.” In short, it was an end to racial segregation in the military, a political act unmatched since the days of Reconstruction after the Civil War. Truman was underappreciated in his day, but he was the one to begin the transformation of our party from the party of racial injustice to the party of civil rights for all Americans. 

When Truman ran for re-election in 1948 the divisions within the Democratic Party were so pronounced that a significant number of elected Democrats with segregationist and racist views broke away from the party to form a new, thankfully short-lived, third party officially known as the States' Rights Democratic Party. Despite strong performances in the south by the Dixiecrats, as the members of the new party were generally called, Truman won re-election by a narrow margin, and continued to champion Civil Rights. After the election the Dixiecrats disbanded, with the more moderate members returning to the Democratic Party and some of the more extreme segregationists switching to the Republican Party, where racist views were gaining more acceptance.

In 1952 America elected Dwight Eisenhower, the first Republican to win the Presidency since the Great Depression. Widely acclaimed as a war hero, the Commanding General in the European Theatre of WWII was a popular figure in the country. As an Army General, he had avoided politics during his military career, but both parties wanted him as their candidate for President in 1952. He ultimately decided to run as a Republican and easily beat Democrat Adlai Stevenson II both in 1952 and for re-election in 1956. Stevenson won only in the "Old South" where Democrats were still the stronger of the two parties, by a huge margin. Eisenhower was a very moderate Republican by today's standards, carrying on and even expanding many of the programs of the Roosevelt and Truman Administrations. However, both he and his Vice President, Richard Nixon, were staunchly opposed to Communism, and Eisenhower's eight years in office marked the true start of both the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the deployment of "advisors" to South Vietnam in 1955, with the first deaths in Vietnam by U.S. soldiers in 1959.

The election of 1960 pitted Vice President Nixon, on the Republican side, against Senator John F. Kennedy. Kennedy won by a small popular margin, but it was a decisive 303-219 win in the electoral college. JFK inherited a raging Cold War with the Soviets, an impending hot war in Vietnam and racial strife in our own country. Plus he needed to develop a working relationship with a Vice President who had been, until just recently, his most bitter political rival within his own party, Lyndon B. Johnson, and an FBI Director named J. Edgar Hoover who he didn't trust, for very good reasons.

Kennedy's time in office was cut short by an assassin's bullet just as he was about to launch his re-election campaign in 1963, and Lyndon Johnson became the new President. While Kennedy and Johnson had been barely on speaking terms when they served together in the Senate, and had been political rivals for the 1960 Democratic nomination, when Johnson took over he promised to continue with the policies that Kennedy had initiated. So, while none of his dreams became reality during his lifetime, Kennedy was actually responsible for many of the programs and policies that his successors eventually got much of the credit for. Without Kennedy's hopes and aspirations for our country, we would not have had Medicare and Medicaid as soon as we did. Thanks to Kennedy we became the world's leader in space exploration during the Johnson Administration, and we made enormous strides in the quest for civil rights for all Americans, regardless of skin color.

It was during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations that the two political parties completely traded places when it came to civil rights. Once the pro-slavery party, the Democratic Party became the party of integration and equal rights for African-Americans. Once the party of abolitionists, the GOP began welcoming former Democrats who were opposed to integration and equal rights. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, once considered to be a Republican proposal was embraced by Democrats in the federal government and opposed by conservative Republicans. It was passed by Congress and signed into law by President Johnson, becoming the most significant accomplishment of Johnson's only full term.

Johnson's Presidency was hamstrung by an escalated and unpopular involvement in the Vietnam War, which resulted in a large number of anti-war protests across the country. Those protests, coupled with a renewed push for enforcement of the Civil Rights Act, especially in the south, resulted in Johnson not seeking a second full term in office. 

Even before Johnson announced his decision to not seek another term as President on March 31, 1968, the Democratic Party was severely divided. Eugene McCarthy had announced in November the previous year that he would be challenging Johnson for the nomination. George Wallace, Alabama's segregationist governor, had left the party to the American Independent Party. Another segregationist governor, Lester Maddox of Georgia, had begun a campaign for the Democratic Party's nomination, but dropped out early and endorsed Wallace. Just two weeks before Johnson's announcement that he would not run, President John Kennedy's younger brother, the former Attorney General and sitting U.S. Senator from New York, Robert F. Kennedy also announced that he would run. Kennedy's campaign was short-lived as, like his older brother, he was assassinated mere minutes after becoming the front-runner by winning the California primary in June. After Bobby's assassination, George McGovern entered the race in August, hoping to win Kennedy's delegates over. Ultimately, Johnson's Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, jumped in and received Johnson's endorsement. Humphrey won the nomination at a very contentious convention in Chicago, but had a seriously uphill battle, leading a fragmented Democratic Party against former Republican Vice President Richard Nixon.

Nixon's 1968 campaign strategy, dubbed the "Southern Strategy", was to take advantage of the fractures in the Democratic Party by wooing as many of Wallace's racist supporters in the south away from the American Independent candidate as possible. It worked. Wallace carried only five states in the deep south. Nixon won all of the reliably Republican states plus most of the normally reliably Democratic southern states, cruising to an easy 301-191 Electoral College victory over Humphrey, who was only able to come away with 13 northern states plus the District of Columbia.

In 1976 the Republican party had troubles of its own. Mired in the Watergate Scandal of 1972, Nixon had resigned in 1974. His Vice President, Gerald Ford, who Nixon had appointed to succeed scandal-plagued Spiro Agnew in 1973, became President. Having been appointed, never elected to anything except the House of Representatives, Ford was a weak candidate who pursued a "Rose Garden Strategy", rarely making public appearances, and lost to the former Democratic governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter.

Carter has been much maligned by Republicans, but he'll probably go down in history as an above-average president. He had the misfortune of inheriting a terrible economy from Nixon, who had tried to stop inflation with unsuccessful wage and price controls, and Ford, who tried to do the same thing by encouraging people to wear WIN (Whip Inflation Now) campaign-style buttons. Carter was never able to get the economy back on track. That, and the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979, where 66 Americans were held hostage by Iranian revolutionaries for over a year, led to his 1980 defeat at the hands of former Hollywood actor and California governor, Ronald Reagan.

There was talk at the time that the Reagan campaign had struck a secret deal with the new regime in Iran to hold the hostages until after the election to insure a win by Reagan, in exchange for recognition of their new Islamic theocracy and favors once the Republican was sworn in, but those accusations were never proven. The hostages were released during Reagan's inauguration ceremony. He never formally recognized the new government, but he did engage in several "backchannel" deals with them for military weapons.

Despite obvious signs of rapidly deteriorating mental health, and the economic health of the country deteriorating as well, Reagan was reelected in 1984 and was followed in office in 1988 by his vice president, George H.W. Bush. Prior to being picked as Reagan's running mate in 1980, Bush had referred to Trickle-Down Economics, which Reagan had renamed "Supply Side Economics", as "Voodoo Economics". Although Supply Side Economics, or whatever name you prefer to call it, had benefited only the rich investor class, and had failed to move the country forward or benefit the middle class at all, Bush embraced it to placate big donors. By 1992, as Bush prepared to run for a second term, the nation's economy was in very poor shape. There had been a fairly severe recession in 1991, and although the economy had recovered somewhat by 1992, the recovery wasn't robust enough to help average Americans.

With most of the country suffering under the failed economic policies of the Republican Party and all of their candidates, a young and little-known former governor of Arkansas named Bill Clinton began campaigning using a campaign slogan of "It's the ECONOMY, stupid!" It worked! It wasn't even close! Bush was soundly defeated, picking up only 168 votes in the Electoral College, to Clinton's 370. 

The economy under Clinton is widely remembered for a historic period of sustained growth, job creation, and deficit reduction. Fueled in large part by the booming tech sector and the rise of the internet, his administration achieved continuous economic expansion and transformed massive budget deficits into record surpluses, resulting in Clinton's policies being overwhelming popular. New of the successes of Clinton's policies, however, were often overshadowed by the public's perception of his pre-presidential business dealings and personal morals.

During Clinton's 1996 reelection campaign the Republican-led House of Representatives began investigating a land deal (known as "Whitewater") that Clinton had been marginally involved in. That investigation . . . actually a "fishing expedition" by the Republicans . . . didn't damage Clinton enough to stop his reelection bid in 1996. The booming economy was viewed by the voting public as being far more important than a land deal involving Clinton's friends that had gone bad. Clinton was able to easily beat Senator Bob Dole, 379-159 in the Electoral College. 

But Clinton's woes weren't over! Alleged sexual encounters in the Oval Office with White House Intern Monica Lewinsky, and an unsubstantiated rape allegation by Paula Jones, led to the Republicans expanding their "a congressional investigation and ultimately his impeachment on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice by the House, although Clinton was acquitted of both charges by the Senate. 

The presidential election of 2000 pitted Vice President Al Gore against Texas Governor George W. Bush, the son of former President George H.W. Bush. With Gore leading in the Electoral College by 20 votes, and Florida's 25 votes hanging in the balance, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered the counting of the ballots in that state to be stopped, with 175, 655 ballots still uncounted and Bush leading in Florida by less than 600 votes, handing the presidency to the Texas governor. Less than eight months after Bush was sworn in as the 43rd President of the United States, on September 11th of 2001, a band of radical Islamic terrorists, under the direction of Osama bin Laden, launched terrorist attacks using hijacked commercial jetliners against the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Arlington, VA. That sparked the "Global War on Terrorism" against Iraq, and later Afghanistan, and involved several other countries in the Middle East and Africa. That war lasted well beyond Bush's presidency until the final withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces from Afghanistan late in August of 2021.

In addition to initiating small wars around the globe, the Bush Administration had gone back to the "Supply Side Economics" of the Reagan/Bush 41 administrations, ending the booming economy of the Clinton years and bringing about the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The presidential election of 2008 was the first time since 1952 that neither the incumbent president nor vice president was on the ballot. Republican Senator John McCain from Arizona and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin faced off against U.S. Senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden. Although the popular vote difference was only 7.2%, the Obama/Biden ticket easily beat the McCain/Palin ticket by 192 electoral votes in the Electoral College, 365-173.

Although Obama continued some facets of Bush's War on Terror, eventually tracking down and killing Osama bin Laden, no new wars were started and he got the economy turned around, ending what became known as the Great Recession of 2008. Probably the biggest single achievement of Obama's tenure was his signature healthcare legislation, know officially as the Affordable Care Act and commonly referred to as "Obamacare". Under Obama, the United States reached its pinnacle of greatness, and things looked very promising for a Democrat to succeed him in office in 2016. However, a split in the Democratic Party between supporters of the moderate former First Lady and Secretary of State, the junior senator from New York at the time, Hillary Clinton and more progressive Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont. Supporters of the two Democratic candidates engaged in heated verbal, and occasionally physical, altercations. The disharmony within the party led to many of the supporters of Sanders to not support Clinton's candidacy, which resulted in an extremely close loss for Clinton to real estate developer and reality TV host Donald Trump.

Trump had campaigned on a theme of "Make America Great Again", promising to build an unscalable wall along our entire southern border to keep out the Mexican, Central American and South American refugees, who he stereotyped as rapists and murderers. Blaming everything bad that ever happened in America on immigrants from south of the border, Trump managed a 304-227 Electoral College win, despite losing the popular vote to Senator Clinton by nearly 3 million votes. Trump reinstituted Trickle-Down Economics and tried to undo anything and everything that Obama had accomplished while doing everything he could to convince his working class "MAGA" supporters that their inability to achieve the "American Dream" was the fault of the immigrants, Muslims and people of color in general. Although somewhat weakened by Trump's policies, the economy remained relatively strong until early 2020.

In late 2019 a deadly virus broke out in Wuhan, China and began to spread, with the first cases in the U.S.A. reported in January of 2020. By March of 2020, COVID-19 had spread worldwide, leading the World Health Organization (WHO) to declare it a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Trump's initial response to the virus, as it spread, was to say that "maybe it will just go away". With Covid-19 raging in Europe, Trump ordered an end to all flights arriving in the country from Asia, but allowed flights from Europe to continue bringing the virus into the U.S. Due to Trump being slow to react to Covid's spread, with over 18,600 confirmed deaths and more than 500,000 confirmed cases in under four months, the U.S. became the country with the most reported COVID-19 cases and deaths, surpassing Italy and Spain as a global hot-spot for the virus. Lack of personnel in many industries, especially the trucking industry, resulted in the supply chain for many goods to completely break down. At its peak, it was impossible to find many items, including something as basic as toilet paper, in stores. Trump continued to downplay the seriousness of the disease, hosting mask-free events, even when he himself contracted the virus and came close to dying from it, saved only by experimental treatments that were not available to the general public.

By late summer of 2020, Trump's popularity, even among his faithful MAGA supporters had begun to wane, resulting in a close (51.3% to 46.8%) popular vote loss, but decisive Electoral College loss (306-232) to former Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris. For the next two months, Trump did everything he could think of to reverse the results of the election, from going to court in multiple states that he'd lost to try to get his own Electoral College electors certified as the true electors to demanding that the Secretary of State of Georgia "find" him 11,780 more votes to give him the win in Georgia. Every one of those attempts failed. Even Trump's vice president, Mike Pence, acknowledged that the election was fair and that Trump had lost. Trump's last effort to change the results was on January 6th of 2021, when he addressed a crowd of his supporters, telling them that he'd won the election "by a landslide" and urging them to march down the street to the Capitol to "take back our country". 

They did just that. They marched to the Capitol and stormed it, trying to stop the ceremonial counting of the electoral votes that would formally declare Joe Biden to be the winner. Members of Congress, some of whom now try to rewrite history, calling it a "normal tourist event by patriots", were forced to flee for their lives as the mob broke into the building, chanting "Hang Mike Pence" and "Hang Nancy Pelosi", while they vandalized the building. It was to no avail, as the votes were officially counted that night and Joe Biden was officially declared the winner.

History will record the Biden Presidency as extremely successful. Research into treatments and vaccines for Covid were expedited and accelerated, and Covid soon came under control. The supply chain was rebuilt and a massive infrastructure rebuilding was begun. Two stimulus checks, one that came during Trump's term and a second early in Biden's, caused inflation to skyrocket, but by the time that the 2024 campaign started heating up, inflation was beginning to come down. But, continuing his claims that he'd actually won the 2020 election, Trump rallied his supporters and was actually a little less than 1% ahead of Biden in the polls, but Biden's polls had been improving while Trump's were going down. Then there was the one and only debate between the two men that changed history.

Biden was ill that night, and he'd never been a particularly good public speaker, suffering since childhood with a speech impediment. The combination of those two facts led to what many experts believe was the absolute worst performance in a debate by any presidential candidate in history. Trump's campaign seized on the opportunity to claim that Biden was mentally incapable of serving as president, and enough Democrats believed it as well to cause them to persuade the president to withdraw from the race. He did so, and endorsed Kamala Harris to get the party's nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August.

As was the case in both of Trump's previous presidential elections, Trump failed to reach the 50% threshold in the popular vote, receiving only 49.8% of the vote, but Green Party candidate Jill Stein and other 3rd party candidates drew enough votes away from Harris to give Trump the win. Although Trump will go to his grave claiming that he'd won the 2016, 2020 and 2024 elections, all by landslides, history will note that Donald Trump has never received a majority of the vote in any election. However, this is where we are in 2026. It's now up to Democrats to choose who will run against Trump's hand-picked successor in 2028.