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The Democratic PartyAmerican Political PartyClick here for a list of candidates from all American political partiesThe Democratic Party is one of the world's oldest political parties and is the party with the longest record of continuous operation in the United States. It is also one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party.The party arose from opposition to the policies of the ruling Federalist Party, which was dominated by Alexander Hamilton and advocated a strong central government, a loose interpretation of the Constitution, and a republic governed by a well-educated professional class. After 1830, the Democratic Party became a coalition of farmers, city-dwelling laborers, and Irish Catholics. Democrats, while strongly favoring expansion to new farm lands, opposed elites and aristocrats, the Bank of the United States, and modernizing programs that would build up industry at the expense of the taxpayer. The Democratic National Committee (DNC) was created at the party's 1848 national convention, and the Democrats gained strength as the opposing Whig Party declined and finally collapsed in 1852. The party split in the 1860s over slavery and the Civil War, however, and was weakened for decades over its opposition to the war. But the Democrats eventually benefited from Southern resentment over the same issues, and by the 1880s the term "Solid South" could be used to describe a region which voted almost completely Democratic. The party won the 1884 Presidential election when a somewhat accurate description of the Democrats as the party of "Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion" went unrepudiated by the Republican candidate. The party was weakened again, however, when it nominated the radical William Jennings Bryan as its Presidential candidate in 1896, and the Republicans would be the dominant American political party until the 1930s, the two terms of the Woodrow Wilson administration being one exception. The Great Depression then swept Democrat Franklin Roosevelt into power in 1932, and the Democratic Party became the party of regulation and insurance against hardship, maintaining a decades-long dominance broken only by the Eisenhower administration of the 50s. The party would be shattered again over war and civil rights, this time Vietnam and the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, and the party would lose two Presidential elections in a row. The loss of the "Solid South" followed by the loss of "Reagan Democrats" in the 80s led to further electoral losses until the election of 1992, when Democrat Bill Clinton was elected after Independent candidate Ross Perot split the conservative vote. Clinton was re-elected in 1996, but the Republicans regained majority control of both houses of Congress in 1994 and would generally retain and even build on those majorities during the next several years. The Democratic Party would again be divided over war, this time the Iraq War, but that war's unpopularity and Republican scandals and ineptitude led to a Democratic resurgence in the Congressional elections of 2006. The party continued to build on this success, putting the first African-American President in the White House with the help of the Financial Crisis of 2008. Source: Wikipedia.org |