Category Archives: Democrat

WASHINGTON Earlier this week, voters in Californias 53rd district began receiving mailers touting Chris Stoddard, a Republican running for Congress in the district.

The flyer promoted Stoddards positions on gun rights (supports the 2nd Amendment and a nationwide concealed carry permit), health care (opposes Obamacare), and immigration (supports building the Wall"), among other issues.

Get the Facts, the mailer reads. Vote for your priorities on Tues., March 3.

The second mailer arrived Thursday, outlining Stoddards positions and declaring, Make your voice heard. Vote your conservative priorities.

Its good advertising for Stoddard, a pilot for the US Marine Corps Reserves. The only problem? Stoddard said he has nothing to do with it and has no idea who sent them.

The mailers have no disclosure, as required by the Federal Election Commission for all political mailings and its not clear who sent them. The first mailer was first reported by the San Diego Union-Tribune Thursday. BuzzFeed News obtained photos of the second mailer from Stoddard Friday.

Stoddard said he doesnt want to speculate about where the mailers came from but confirmed to BuzzFeed News in an interview Friday that they werent from him.

Georgette Gmez, a Democrat running in the district who has been endorsed by Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, said she thinks she knows where the mailers are coming from and she believes theyre an effort to knock her out of the race in next Tuesdays primary.

California has a jungle primary system, which sends the top two vote-getters in the primary to the general election regardless of party. According to a recent San Diego Union-Tribune/10News poll, Sara Jacobs, a self-funding Democrat running in the district, is currently favored to finish first in the primary on March 3, polling at about 23%. Gmez and Stoddard polled at 5% and 10%, respectively.

Gmezs campaign told BuzzFeed News it believes the mailer is coming from Jacobs campaign or Forward California, a super PAC formed in January of this year to support her campaign and funded entirely by Jacobs billionaire grandparents. Jacobs campaign has denied sending the mailers.

It's clear that somebody with resources is trying to influence voters, and they're doing it and without even putting disclaimers. That's intentional, Gmez said in an interview with BuzzFeed News Friday. This person that is getting lifted has no money... [Stoddard] has not shown up to any of the debates, so there's clearly somebody trying to lift somebody who, just on paper, he's running. We know for a fact that it's not the Republican Party doing it.

The Gmez campaign filed a complaint with the FEC earlier this week arguing that Jacobs or Forward California is illegally sending mailers without disclosures. (Stoddard said the Gmez campaign never reached out to him to ask if it was him sending the mailers.)

The Jacobs campaign told BuzzFeed News that it didnt send the mailers and doesn't know who did.

This is the type of silly, baseless attack you often see right before Election Day, and voters are tired of it, Morgan Hill, a spokesperson for the Jacobs campaign, said in a statement. Quite frankly, we expect better from fellow Democrats. Sara will stay focused on talking to voters about what she will do to make their lives better, as she has been doing throughout this campaign.

The campaign released a second statement Friday afternoon disavowing the mailers.

This mailer did not come from our campaign. If this mailer was sent out with the intention of helping our campaign, we fully disavow it, said Amy Kuhn, Jacobs' campaign manager. We have been fully transparent in all of our communications and we believe all others should do the same. We believe all pieces of paid communication should state who paid for it.

The Jacobs campaign also ran a television ad this week that compares and contrasts Jacobs to Stoddard and doesn't mention any other candidates in the race.

It is, you know, either an insane coincidence that [the mailer] happened during the same week, or, you know, what we believe is that it came from her, Gmezs campaign manager Elijah Lefkow told BuzzFeed News Friday.

Stoddard said he only learned about both mailers when a friend of his who received them told him about them. The information on the mailer is taken almost exactly from Stoddards website, he said, though in some cases it frames his positions differently than he would.

It says [I] oppose immigration to allow sanctuary cities, it says oppose Obamacare and government-run health care, and it says oppose using tax dollars to pay health care costs for people in the country illegally, Stoddard said. I mean, I'm not 100% against health care for all, [but] I'm not really for the Affordable Care Act, because it did affect a lot of people in a negative way. So, you know, I guess it does align with my views. Its just an interesting way they put it on here.

Right now, he said hell take the free advertising, but he does worry that whoever is sending them could turn against him.

The scary part for me is just that somebody is sending out stuff with my face all over it, you know, pretty much speaking on my behalf, and I didn't allow it, he said. So I don't know if this is a setup where, at some point, one of them's going to come out just blasting me, you know, but without knowing who it came from, it's a little bit scary knowing that people can just do this.

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Someone Is Trying To Help This Republican Win A Democratic Seat In California He Just Has No Idea Who - BuzzFeed News

The US Democratic Party is undergoing something of an identity crisis as it debates what direction to take ahead of the looming battle with President Donald Trump, a Republican, in November.

A tension between the so-called progressive wing of the party, led by Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and the moderates like Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg is dominating the primary elections.

Let's break it down by issues and compare the current field to figures in history and leading politicians from the UK.

When there's a Democratic nominee, we will reprise the format, adding Trump and world leaders.

Taxes will always be a hot-button political issue in the US.

Back in 1992, Bill Clinton came into office with a fairly ambitious plan to reverse many of the Ronald Reagan-era tax cuts, but he still enacted a middle-class tax cut as part of his package. Democrats today are more aggressive.

Amy Klobuchar typifies the "moderate" position of wanting to raise corporate taxes, but not back to pre-Trump levels, and ensure that all billionaires pay at least 30% of their income in taxes. Michael Bloomberg has called for a 5% surtax on income above $5m - part of a plan he says will raise $5tn.

The real action comes with those seeking funding for their more ambitious plans, however. Elizabeth Warren has proposed a tax on all wealth above $50m - property, stock, everything - that would bankroll her education and healthcare programmes.

Across the pond, Margaret Thatcher set the baseline with her conservative, tax-and-regulation-slashing agenda.

Healthcare, the top issue for many Democratic voters, has been the source of spirited debate for all the 2020 candidates.

The biggest differences are between candidates like Pete Buttigieg, who endorses a government-run health insurance option to compete with private companies, and Sanders, who wants a government-run system to replace all private insurance. Warren originally endorsed the Sanders plan, but she's recently called for a more incremental path to getting there.

Obama considered a "public option" (now endorsed by Buttigieg) when pushing his Affordable Care Act through Congress in 2010, but it was considered a political bridge too far. Now, all the Democrats are on the other side of that particular river - although none are advocating an entirely government-run healthcare system like the UK's NHS, which even Conservative Prime Minster Boris Johnson wholeheartedly defends.

Former President Barack Obama strongly backed immigration reform, including giving many undocumented US residents a pathway to citizenship, but he also increased enforcement of US immigration laws and increased deportation of new entrants and those with criminal records. His Vice-President, Joe Biden, has defended the Obama record and promises to restore his policies after Donald Trump's hard-line changes.

Former candidate Julian Castro was the first to propose repealing a law that made entering the US without proper documentation a criminal offence. Castro has since endorsed Warren, and she has adopted his proposal, as well as backing the elimination of private immigration detention centres and the movement by "sanctuary cities" to refuse to co-operate with federal immigration officials.

On the other side of the spectrum sits Nigel Farage, the godfather of Brexit and an ardent foe of the EU's immigration policies.

One of the more spirited exchanges during the January Democratic debate in Iowa was between Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders over how engaged the US should be in the Middle East and the necessity of maintaining US military forces overseas.

The divide between Biden, the former chair of the Senate foreign relations committee, and Sanders, a long-time peace activist, stretches back decades - and was on stark display during Biden's support and Sanders' opposition to the 2002 Iraq War authorising resolution.

Tulsi Gabbard was not on that debate stage, but she is without a doubt the most outspoken non-interventionist in the Democratic field, as the Iraq War veteran regularly rails against what she says are never-ending US "regime change" wars.

Gabbard is still arguably to the right of Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, however.

Meanwhile, the position of President Lyndon Baines Johnson - the architect of the Vietnam War - on this chart is a reminder that Democrats could be considerably more hawkish than they are now.

There have always been anti-free-trade currents in the Democratic party, but in 1993 Bill Clinton effectively overcame their opposition to push through the North America Free Trade Agreement (Nafta).

The party has moved rather decisively to the left on trade in recent years, however, with Elizabeth Warren opposing the Trans-Pacific Partnership, among other recent trade deals. Bernie Sanders has gone one step further, opposing Trump's Nafta renegotiation, the US-Mexico-Canada agreement.

Michael Bloomberg is the free-trade outlier in the field, having called on the US to rejoin a renegotiated Trans-Pacific Partnership and vocally denounced Trump's trade war with China. He's still a far cry from British free-trader Tony Blair, who backed the UK's EU membership, wanted to offer membership to Turkey and advocated replacing the British pound with the euro.

Former Vice-President and Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore was once the face of the Democratic Party's environmentalist movement. When he ran for president in 2000, he backed a plan that included using tax credits, market incentives and government technological investments to address climate change and other threats to the globe.

While ambitious at the time, it pales in comparison to the Green New Deal, which all the Democratic candidates have agreed to, at least as a framework to build on. Bloomberg and Tom Steyer, in particular, have made addressing climate change a top issue. While Biden hasn't spent as much time touting his environmental plan, it is - on paper - at least as extensive.

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US election: How left-wing is the Democratic field? - BBC News

In 2008, Rush Limbaugh hatched a plan. By March, John McCain had locked down the Republicans nomination, and while Barack Obama held a lead in delegates, he and Hillary Clinton were still duking it out in the Democratic primaries. If their fight could be prolonged, surely the winner would be too bloodied to pose as much of a threat to McCain in November, Limbaugh surmised. Dubbing his plan Operation Chaos, the conservative radio host urged his listeners to show up in open primary states, most notably Indiana, and vote for Clinton in an effort to lengthen the race.

For the last several weeks, right-wingers on the message board 4chan and in r/The_Donald, a subsection of Reddit made up of some of the presidents most toxic online supporters, have talked about encouraging their members to take part in a new operation chaos, starting in South Carolina, the first open primary of the 2020 election cycle. While there have been dozens of posts discussing the prospect, no singular coordinated effort seems to have taken hold, and it is unlikely that even an organized campaign to troll the Democratic primaries would have much effect.

The Left is totally devouring itself and its a Glorious sight to see. Gulag Bernie Bros have so much hate for Pocahontas.. we should Vote for Warren in any open primaries and keep her going, one Trump fan on Reddit wrote in a post that picked up over 1,000 upvotes, likely making it to the large subreddits homepage.

Im voting Bloomberg in the dem primaries. I think all republicans should vote in them for the weakest or most moderate D candidate, a poster wrote in 4chans /pol/ board, the sites politics focused board that has long been a nest of alt-right trolling. My state has an open primary, so I will vote for Yang just to fuck with the DNC, another wrote prior to Andrew Yang dropping out of the race.

Other boards on 4chan have encouraged people to vote for Sanders, reasoning that he is the candidate most likely to bring about a collapse of the United States current order and political systems. (Other users have accused anonymous posters advocating for this accelerationist approach as disingenuous pro-Bernie shills.) Some have encouraged voting for weaker performing candidates like Amy Klobuchar and Pete Buttigieg to help sustain their campaigns and drag out the competitive primary season.

While Limbaugh initially called his 2008 campaign a success, when he has touted it recently he has done so in less certain terms.Actually, it may have worked in Indiana, Limbaugh said on his show in January, before saying that the plots real value was how it got inside Democrats headsa claim thats virtually impossible to measure. At any rate, the Democrats were made paranoid by it, he claimed last month.Theyve never gotten over it.

Clinton did win Indiana over Obama, but her victory was in with what polls at the time suggested how that primary would play out and with results in other states with similar demographics. Democrats and other political observers were skeptical Limbaughs sabotage plan made a difference, and academic research since has found that his efforts were a wash.

In separate studies, Frank Stephenson, an economics professor at Barry College, and Todd Donovan, a political science professor at Western Washington University, both concluded that Limbaughs Operation Chaos in 2008 had little to no impact on the race.

Analysis of exit poll data from 38 states suggests that Republicans may have been voting strategically in Democratic primaries, but there is little evidence that March 4th was unusual in the scope of strategic behavior, Donovan explains in the abstract of his paper. Stephenson, who looked at voting in four states, reached a similar conclusion.

Getting voters to turn out for candidates they actually like is already a difficult proposition. Getting voters to do it for candidates they dont like, even as an act of sabotage, is even harder.

Theres a collective action problem, Stephenson told Mother Jones. People like to talk about monkeying around in other parties elections, but it usually doesnt translate into anything in the real world. Many people dont even show up to vote for candidates that they already support.

According to Donovan, theres a fundamental problem for tricksters like Limbaugh who push such plots. Even if they were to lengthen the contest, evidence suggests that longer, drawn-out primaries dont hurt winning candidates when November comes. Studies have looked into if a contested, long nomination process has an effect on general. The conclusions are that it doesnt, Donovan said.

In a 2015 paper, Robert Hogan of Louisiana State University found that if combative primaries did have an effect, it was one in the opposite direction than anticipated by observers who assume they leave the winner weakened.

Greater divisiveness in a candidates primary leads to a higher vote share in the general election, Hogan concluded. The presence of a primary challenge is found to exert a substantial positive influence for a candidate in the general election, particularly in open seat contests.

Hogan chalks this up to the fact that primaries can help expose voters to far more information about the winning candidate than they would get in a shorter election. The finding suggests that even in cutthroat races, almost any exposure becomes good exposure by the time of the general election. In this way, Hogans analysis suggests that even if Limbaughs intervention had the effect he sought, it would have backfired.

If Limbaugh, one of the rights largest media figures who has a cult of personality and a near-fanatical base of millions of listeners, failed to have a measurable effect in 2008, its hard to believe that aninformal piece-mealed plot launched on fringe internet communities willmake a dent this year.

But 2020 is not 2008, and theres a chance key differences could make such trolling easier and more effective.

As Donovan noted, unlike in 2008, Republicans dont have a competitive election to vote in, potentially giving them more time and energy to raid Democratic elections. But he said he was still skeptical this would actually happen. (South Carolina Republicans canceled their presidential primary this yearprimaries for lower offices wont take place until June.)

Stephenson also pointed out that political movements are formed and shaped differently now than in 2008, with the proliferation of social media. Groups can raise and activate campaigns in diffuse and often little-noticed ways that were only just starting to take shape over a decade ago.

If theres a change, if this year is going to be different somehow, it could happen because of it being a social media environment, he said. Instead of Limbaugh instigating it, people on social media might do it. At the end of the day though, people still have to show up to votewhich is hard.

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4chan Thinks It Is so Smart, but Its Plan to Mess up the Democratic Primary Is Actually Incredibly Stupid. - Mother Jones

The move by some states including California and Texas to move up their primaries to Super Tuesday appears that it's going to backfire on the Democratic Party, Fox News digital politics editor Chris Stirewalt argued on the "I'll Tell You What" podcast.

Speaking alongside "The Daily Briefing" anchor Dana Perino, Stirewalt said that the party establishment appears to have believed that a candidate like former Vice President Joe Biden would be in a strong position and knock out Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., early in the process.

WHICH STATES VOTE ON SUPER TUESDAY?

"The hope that the Democratic establishment had which is why they stupidly moved up all of their big primaries to a super duper Tuesday with a third of the delegates was that there would be an establishment front-runner strong enough and that they wanted to make it end sooner, so that they could knock out Bernie and go on to the races.

"But instead, what they've done is advantage Sanders. And they did it because they thought they would be in a better position than they are. And they thought they would have a better candidate than shoutin' Joe [Biden]," he pointed out.

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Sanders appears to be in a strong position to have a sizable delegate lead after the March 3 contests, with several candidates splitting up the votes behind him. With both California and Texas,the nations two most populous states,holding primaries on Tuesday, around 40 percent on Americans will be voting on Super Tuesday.

Perino and Stirewalt went on to discuss the various scenarios for how it could play out, with Stirewalt arguing that only Mike Bloomberg is in a position to potentially overperform on Super Tuesday and start to steal some momentum from Sanders going forward.

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Chris Stirewalt: Why Super Tuesday looks like it will backfire on Democrats - Fox News

Image: Michael Harriot (The Root), Photo: Win McNamee (Getty Images), Shutterstock

On Saturday, voters in South Carolina will sound the starting gun for the race to the Democratic nomination for president of the United States. After giving white America a head start on selecting the partys nominee, the Democratic Party now turns to South Carolina.

Black voters cast about 6 percent of the combined votes in Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. However, South Carolinas Democratic electorate is 55 percent black and the states black turnout is higher than the national and state participation rate for white voters.

Now that the competitors had the chance to warm up their campaigns in the whiter states, we decided to investigate how the contenders plan to address racism, inequality and other issues that affect black people. To do this, we examined each official candidates campaign literature, as well as their past statements, policies and political histories.

We asked policy experts, legal scholars and political pundits, all of whom were black, to help us devised a policy matrix. Then we graded each plan on a scale of 1 to 10 using the following criteria:

If the candidates campaign literature doesnt include a specific black plan, we examined their individual policy proposals to see what effect their plan would have on black America.

Like her polling numbers, Tulsi Gabbards black agenda is nonexistent.

Amy Klobuchar doesnt have a separate plan for black America. However, heres what we found when we examined her campaigns proposals.

The Greenwood Initiative (pdf) is Michael Bloombergs plan for Economic Justice but he also has a number of other ideas.

*Michael Bloomberg will not be on the ballot in the S.C. primaries.

Bernie Sanders plan for racial justice is only a small part of his agenda for black America.

Tom Steyer recently released his all-encompassing African American Policy (pdf).

Pete Buttigiegs Douglass Plan for Black America is long as fuck. However, no points were deducted for length.

Joe Biden doesnt have a separate plan that spells out his vision for black America but heres what we found by examining his platform:

Elizabeth Warrens plan is called A Working Agenda for Black America.

There you have it. Elizabeth Warrens black agenda is the blackest of them all. Unfortunately, she also seems to be invisible to everyone except Mike Bloomberg. But thats only because she keeps punching him in the face during the debates.

Then again, weve only counted the white votes.

Clarification, 2/28/20, 2:25 p.m: While the College & Student Debt section of Elizabeth Warrens Working Agenda for Black America focuses on student debt, it does propose $50 billion in HBCU funding.

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Every Democratic Candidates' 'Black Agenda,' Ranked - The Root

Election results in places near Whole Foods, Lululemon, Urban Outfitters and Apple

2016 Election Results by Precinct

2016 Election Results by Precinct

In the past decade, Democratic voting strength has become increasingly concentrated in precincts within five miles of current Whole Foods, Lululemon, Urban Outfitters and Apple Store locations. But those precincts made up just 34 percent of the nation's vote in 2016 -- and just 29 percent in battleground states.Note: Battleground states are defined by the 10 states decided by less than four percentage points in 2016: Ariz., Fla., Maine, Minn., Nev., N.H., N.C., Mich., Pa., Wis.

Its no secret that Democratic primary voters prize fall electability. But for all the clamor about progressive versus moderate choices, the obstacles to pulling voters toward Democrats -- particularly in the battleground states -- could prove more cultural than ideological.

Last summer, Senator Elizabeth Warren electrified huge crowds at rallies in Seattle, Austin and New York. The events had one thing in common besides her populist pitch for big structural change. At each stop, her trademark selfie lines were less than a mile from a Whole Foods Market, a Lululemon Athletica and an Urban Outfitters.

These high-end retailers and brands, popular with urban millennials and affluent suburbanites alike, are increasingly correlated with which neighborhoods are trending blue. The drawback for Democrats? Just 34 percent of U.S. voters and only 29 percent of battleground state voters live within five miles of at least one such upmarket retailer, and the Democrats brand is stagnant or in decline everywhere else.

Once dominant in labor halls, Democrats are more ascendant than ever near galleria malls. But the reality for Democrats is if they arent able to stop their slide in less elite locales, President Trumps advantage in the Electoral College could further widen relative to the popular vote.

In fairness, Ms. Warren and the other top 2020 contenders are spending more of their time and energy seeking to woo voters in less cosmopolitan settings. They have no choice: Sixty-nine percent of U.S. voters live closer to a Cracker Barrel, Tractor Supply Company, Hobby Lobby or Bass Pro Shops location than to one of those high-end brands.

But it wasnt always this hard for Democrats. In the 1990s, millions of less religious middle-class heartland voters opted for Democrats, in part because they viewed Republicans as the party of rich people and Bible thumpers who wanted to impose their moral values on the country. Today, many of those same voters might feel they have even less in common with liberal arts graduates in trendy ZIP codes willing to pay $14 for a half liter of avocado oil, $59 for a recycled tie-dye sweatshirt, $158 for yoga tights or $1,449 for a smartphone.

In many ways, what people buy, eat and wear is just another lens through which to view the growing political divide between Americans with college degrees and those without.

Its cultural arrogance, said the veteran Democratic strategist James Carville, who now teaches at Louisiana State University. On taxing the rich, health care, Roe v. Wade, he added, were in the majority on all these issues. But in this country, culture trumps policy. The urbanists voters think theyre too cool for school. And voters pick it up.

His advice to todays Democrats: If you want to win back loggers in northern Wisconsin, stop talking about pronouns and start talking more about corruption in Big Pharma.

Plenty of different factors decide vote choices, race and religion among them. There used to be far more high-income white Republicans than high-income white Democrats; today their numbers are roughly even. But the biggest swing among voters in recent years in parts of Europe, too is happening among whites along educational lines.

This cultural and class disconnect was one of the reasons Mr. Trumps 2016 victory blindsided so many academics, pundits and journalists. He was unpopular relative to past G.O.P. nominees in the wealthy, white and highly college-educated neighborhoods the Whole Foods bubbles where such people tend to live and work.

To quantify the relationship between retail locations and voting, we analyzed retail and precinct-level election data compiled for this article by the U.C.L.A. postdoctoral research fellow Ryne Rohla and Grant Gregory, a pollster for Breakthrough Campaigns.

After examining the voting patterns surrounding over 100 popular American chains, we zeroed in on eight national brands each with retail locations in over 40 states that proved useful predictors.

Of the eight brands, the four correlated with Democratic vote growth were the Amazon-owned organic mecca Whole Foods Market; the Canadian-based yoga and athleisure apparel retailer Lululemon Athletica; the hipster fashion magnet Urban Outfitters; and the glassy, minimalist Apple Store. Lets call these upmarket brands.

The four brands correlated with recent Republican gains were the Southern-themed Cracker Barrel Old Country Store; the booming rural lifestyle chain Tractor Supply Company; the arts-and-crafts giant Hobby Lobby; and the outdoor recreation hub Bass Pro Shops. Well call these down-home brands.

Next, we divided the countrys electorate based on the proximity of these stores to the geometric centers of Americas more than 169,000 voting precincts into three groups:

Upmarket bubbles: voters living less than five miles from a current Whole Foods, Lululemon, Apple Store or Urban Outfitters location (34 percent of the electorate in 2016).

Upmarket bubbles are within five miles of a Whole Foods, Lululemon, Apple Store or Urban Outfitters location.

Down-home zones: voters living less than 10 miles from a current Cracker Barrel, Tractor Supply, Bass Pro Shop or Hobby Lobby location (these stores tend to be in less densely populated areas) but more than five miles from the nearest upmarket retail location (50 percent of the electorate in 2016).

Down-home zones are within 10 miles of a Cracker Barrel, Tractor Supply, Bass Pro Shop or Hobby Lobby but at least five miles away from an upmarket location.

Chain-sparse communities: voters who dont live close enough to any of these retail stores to fall into either category (16 percent of the electorate in 2016).

A chain-sparse community is everywhere else.

The good news for Democrats: Over the past few election cycles, theyve gained a lot of ground among voters in upmarket bubbles. In 2016, Hillary Clinton carried them by 31 percentage points, up from Barack Obamas 26-point margin in 2012. And among the 4 percent of voters within one mile of a current Whole Foods/Lululemon/Urban Outfitters/Apple Store location, Mrs. Clinton won by 45 points, up from Mr. Obamas 36-point margin in 2012.

This retail realignment was also on display in the 2018 midterms: Of the 43 districts Democrats wrested from G.O.P. control to take back the House, 65 percent contained a Whole Foods Market, compared with 38 percent of all districts that elected a Republican. And both states where Senate Democrats scored gains Arizona and Nevada have upmarket numbers above the national average.

But the challenge for Democrats is that relatively few voters, especially in Electoral College battleground states, live in these upmarket bubbles.

Consider that in the most recent presidential election, 53 percent of all California voters and 57 percent of all Massachusetts voters lived within five miles of a current Whole Foods, Lululemon, Urban Outfitters or Apple Store location. But in electoral battlegrounds, just 33 percent of voters in Florida, 32 percent in Pennsylvania, 24 percent in North Carolina, 20 percent in Wisconsin and 19 percent in Michigan did.

In 2016, among the roughly half of U.S. voters who live in down-home zones think of places like Saginaw, Mich.; Erie, Pa.; or Green Bay, Wis. Mrs. Clinton lost by 10 points, worse than Mr. Obamas six-point loss in 2012 and his two-point loss in 2008. And among the 16 percent of voters who dont live particularly close to one of these retail brands at all, she lost by 22 points, far worse than Mr. Obamas 11-point loss in 2012 and his six-point loss in 2008.

And all three House districts and all four states Florida, Indiana, Missouri and North Dakota where Republicans gained House or Senate seats from Democrats in 2018 feature either down-home or chain-sparse shares well above the national average.

Whats more, the below-average upmarket shares in Minnesota (30 percent), New Hampshire (22 percent) and Maine (11 percent) suggest Mr. Trump might even have some cultural upside in a few states Mrs. Clinton narrowly carried.

If residential patterns around retail are electoral destiny, trends suggest the Democrats future lies in the Southwest and Sun Belt. Of the six states Mr. Trump carried by less than four points in 2016, Arizona stands out for an upmarket share (37 percent) higher than the nations a good sign for Democrats in that increasingly metropolitan, diverse state.

Democrats might also be encouraged that Texas upmarket share (33 percent) is also higher than those of many other traditional battlegrounds. But President Trumps 2016 margin of victory in Texas was nine points still a lot of ground for the 2020 Democratic nominee to make up.

There will always be plenty of voters who defy stereotypes: Republicans who shop at Whole Foods and Lululemon, or Democrats who stop at Cracker Barrel on road trips. But much as retail chains have effectively micro-segmented consumers to map where new locations will perform best as Whole Foods has done around clusters of college graduates candidates and parties can increasingly depend on lifestyle brand data to predict voter behavior.

Perhaps no presidential candidate has flaunted wealth to the degree Mr. Trump has. But from construction sites to Howard Stern call-ins to WWE appearances, he also spent decades before becoming a politician developing a blue-collar persona. In 2016, as the G.O.P. nominee, he defied history by winning a higher share of low-income whites than high-income whites. And the deepening fault lines of elite versus anti-elite could help Mr. Trump once again this November no matter the Democratic nominees ideological orientation.

Many Democrats who succeeded in 2018 such as the Marine veteran Conor Lamb in a Pennsylvania House race, the water rights lawyer Xochitl Torres Small in a New Mexico House race and Senator Sherrod Brown, a longtime opponent of job outsourcing, in his re-election in Ohio had profiles that appealed across this chasm. But it remains to be seen whether the Democratic presidential nominee will be someone whose background and message can bridge the gap.

Most Americans have already chosen sides for the November election, and its easy to believe there isnt all that much sorting left to do. Its also easy to view the divide as purely urban versus rural. But something all eight of the retailers in this article have in common is a growing presence in the suburbs. That should serve as a reminder that when it comes to elections, not all suburbs look or behave alike.

To beat Mr. Trump, Democrats will probably need a nominee who can relate to people in the modest suburbs of Harrisburg, Pa.; Eau Claire, Wis.; and Fayetteville, N.C. not just the chic suburbs of San Francisco, Dallas and Washington, D.C.

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To Beat Trump, Democrats May Need to Break Out of the 'Whole Foods' Bubble - The New York Times

The historic American Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford, which was built in 1955 and on whose stage Katharine Hepburn, Christopher Plummer and other famous actors performed, burned down last year. Sen. Kevin Kelly is seeking an undetermined amount of state bonding to rebuild the theater.

Republican legislative leaders may be onDemocratic Gov. Ned Lamonts debt diet, but rank-and-file GOP lawmakers are bypassing the proverbial salad bar and eyeing the burger and fries.

Over the first three weeks of the 2020 session, Republicans sponsored 11 bills authorizing more than $112 million in new bonding in their home districts. GOP lawmakers also backed another five measures seeking undetermined amounts of financing for various projects.

Republican leaders said their colleagues simply are doing their duty by asking to use Connecticuts credit card for theaters, community buildings, rail facilities, police and fire stations, a 4-H camp and other projects.

But majority Democratic legislators whom Republicans routinely blast for borrowing too much are crying foul.

This is the disconnection from the facts that the Republican party in the General Assembly is struggling with, House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz, D-Berlin, said Thursday.

House Speaker Joe Aresimowicz

The Republicans math just doesnt work, said Sen. Cathy Osten, D-Sprague, who co-chairs the Appropriations Committee. It just doesnt fit.

But Senate Minority Leader Len Fasano, R-North Haven, countered that rank-and-file Republicans are duty-bound to seek bonding for the projects their respective communities need the most. This is a wish list legislators get from their towns, he said.

Sen. Heather Somers, R-Stonington, asked for $4.25 million $3 million to fund a water and sewer line extension in North Stonington, $500,000 to help construct a new, regional senior center in Griswold, and $750,000 to replace a fuel tank and the ice machine that support the fishing industry at Stonington pier.

If a community asks you, as a senator, to put in a request that is essential to your community, that is your obligation, Somers said.

Sen. Heather Somers

But Lamont said Connecticut needs to get a better handle on these obligations.

With more than $26 billion in bonded debt, Connecticut outranks most states on a debt-per-capita basis.

The governor had called for General Obligation bonding borrowing to be repaid out of the budgets General Fund to be limited to slightly less than $1.4 billion per year.

His fellow Democrats in the legislature pushed back, saying this would harm economic development and affordable housing efforts.

Lamont was willing to consider an annual borrowing level of about $1.77 billion provided legislators supported truck tolls to bolster transportation. The tolling plan never garnered sufficient support and Lamont abandoned it in mid-February. Republican leaders now want the governor to go back to his debt diet.

Rep. Chris Davis of Ellington, the ranking House Republican on the Finance, Revenue and Bonding Committee, said GOP lawmakers can advocate for their respective communities and still support an overall, lean borrowing plan.

Arielle Levin Becker :: CTMirror.org

Sen. George Logan, R-Ansonia

A lot of these requests wont go forward and they [other Republicans] understand that, he said, adding that GOP requests are transparent but most of the asks being made by Democrats remain hidden for now.

Democrats did introduce eight bills seeking nearly $21 million in bonding, and another two bills requesting an undetermined amount of funds.

But most in the Democratic majority simply convey their requests privately to leaders on the bonding subcommittees of the finance board. Those projects may not be identified until the legislature votes on a full bond package weeks or months from now.

Sen. George Logan, R-Ansonia, also said Republican requests for bonding are about fairness.

Much of the money Connecticut borrows is focused in urban areas, where there is a concentration of poverty and also where Democrats hold the majority of legislative seats.

The entire state has issues, not just the urban areas, said Logan, who is seeking $80 million to develop the Naugatuck Valley rail hub and another $5.6 million to repair a fire station and a community center in Hamden.

But Osten said the Republicans cant escape their double-standard.

Democrats seeking bonding can defend their requests just as Logan and Somers did, but Osten said the GOP routinely characterizes projects in Democrats districts as frivolous and wasteful.

To me, bonding is about doing things that help out our communities, she said. They [Republicans] believe in their projects. So do we.

Read more from the original source:

Democrats: GOP has a healthy appetite for borrowing too - The CT Mirror

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b : one who practices social equality

2 capitalized : a member of the Democratic party of the U.S.

a true democrat, he has always abhorred that nation's class system

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'democrat.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.

1789, in the meaning defined at sense 1a

borrowed from French dmocrate, derivative from the base of dmocratie democracy or dmocratique democratic, probably after aristocrate aristocrat

Cite this Entry

Democrat. Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/democrat. Accessed 27 Feb. 2020.

More Definitions for democrat

1 : a person who believes in or practices democracy

2 capitalized : a member of the Democratic party of the United States

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Democrat | Definition of Democrat by Merriam-Webster

The Democratic Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with its main rival, the Republican Party. Tracing its heritage back to Thomas Jefferson and James Madison's Democratic-Republican Party, the modern-day Democratic Party was founded around 1828 by supporters of Andrew Jackson, making it the world's oldest active political party.[18]

In its early years, the Party supported limited government and state sovereignty while opposing banks and supporting slavery. Since Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal coalition in the 1930s, the Democratic Party has promoted a social liberal platform.[3][19] Well into the 20th century, the party had conservative pro-business and Southern conservative-populist wings; following the New Deal, however, the conservative wing of the party largely withered outside the South. The New Deal Coalition of 19321964 attracted strong support from voters of recent European extractionmany of whom were Catholics based in the cities.[20][21][22] After the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the core bases of the two parties shifted, with the Southern states becoming more reliably Republican in presidential politics and the Northeastern states becoming more reliably Democratic. The once-powerful labor union element became smaller and less supportive after the 1970s. White evangelicals and Southerners have become heavily Republican at the state and local levels since the 1990s. People living in urban areas, women, college graduates, sexual minorities, millennials, and black, Latino, Jewish, Muslim, and Asian Americans tend to support the Democratic Party.[23][24][25]

The Democratic Party's philosophy of modern liberalism advocates social and economic equality, along with the welfare state.[26] It seeks to provide government regulation in the economy to promote the public interest.[27] Policies such as environmental protection, support for organized labor and labor unions, the introduction of social programs, affordable college tuition, universal health care, equal opportunity, and consumer protection form the core of the party's economic policy.[26][28] On social issues, it advocates campaign finance reform,[29] LGBT rights,[30] police and immigration reform,[31] stricter gun laws,[32] and the legalization of marijuana.[33]

15 Democrats have served as president of the United States. The first was Andrew Jackson, who was the seventh president and served from 1829 to 1837. The most recent was Barack Obama, who was the 44th and held office from 2009 to 2017. As of 2019, the Democrats hold a majority in the House of Representatives, 15 state government trifectas (governorship and both legislative chambers),[34] the mayoralty of most major American cities,[35] and 19 total state legislatures. Four of the nine sitting justices of the Supreme Court were appointed by Democratic presidents.

Democratic Party officials often trace its origins to the inspiration of the Democratic-Republican Party, founded by Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and other influential opponents of the Federalists in 1792. That party also inspired the Whigs and modern Republicans. Organizationally, the modern Democratic Party truly arose in the 1830s with the election of Andrew Jackson. Since the nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, the party has generally positioned itself to the left of the Republican Party on economic issues. They have been more liberal on civil rights issues since 1948. On foreign policy, both parties have changed position several times.[36]

The Democratic Party evolved from the Jeffersonian Republican or Democratic-Republican Party organized by Jefferson and Madison in opposition to the Federalist Party of Alexander Hamilton and John Adams. The Democratic-Republican Party favored republicanism; a weak federal government; states' rights; agrarian interests (especially Southern planters); and strict adherence to the Constitution; it opposed a national bank, close ties to Great Britain and business and banking interests. The Democratic-Republican Party came to power in the election of 1800.[37]

After the War of 1812, the Federalists virtually disappeared and the only national political party left was the Democratic-Republicans. The era of one-party rule in the United States, known as the Era of Good Feelings, lasted from 1816 until the early 1830s, when the Whig Party became a national political group to rival the Democratic-Republicans.

The Democratic-Republican Party split over the choice of a successor to President James Monroe. The faction that supported many of the old Jeffersonian principles, led by Andrew Jackson and Martin Van Buren, became the modern Democratic Party.[38] As Norton explains the transformation in 1828:

Jacksonians believed the people's will had finally prevailed. Through a lavishly financed coalition of state parties, political leaders, and newspaper editors, a popular movement had elected the president. The Democrats became the nation's first well-organized national party [...] and tight party organization became the hallmark of nineteenth-century American politics.[39]

Behind the platforms issued by state and national parties stood a widely shared political outlook that characterized the Democrats:

The Democrats represented a wide range of views but shared a fundamental commitment to the Jeffersonian concept of an agrarian society. They viewed the central government as the enemy of individual liberty. The 1824 "corrupt bargain" had strengthened their suspicion of Washington politics. [...] Jacksonians feared the concentration of economic and political power. They believed that government intervention in the economy benefited special-interest groups and created corporate monopolies that favored the rich. They sought to restore the independence of the individualthe artisan and the ordinary farmerby ending federal support of banks and corporations and restricting the use of paper currency, which they distrusted. Their definition of the proper role of government tended to be negative, and Jackson's political power was largely expressed in negative acts. He exercised the veto more than all previous presidents combined. Jackson and his supporters also opposed reform as a movement. Reformers eager to turn their programs into legislation called for a more active government. But Democrats tended to oppose programs like educational reform mid the establishment of a public education system. They believed, for instance, that public schools restricted individual liberty by interfering with parental responsibility and undermined freedom of religion by replacing church schools. Nor did Jackson share reformers' humanitarian concerns. He had no sympathy for American Indians, initiating the removal of the Cherokees along the Trail of Tears.[40]

Opposing factions led by Henry Clay helped form the Whig Party. The Democratic Party had a small yet decisive advantage over the Whigs until the 1850s, when the Whigs fell apart over the issue of slavery. In 1854, angry with the KansasNebraska Act, anti-slavery Democrats left the party and joined Northern Whigs to form the Republican Party.[41][42]

The Democrats split over the choice of a successor to President James Buchanan along Northern and Southern lines as factions of the party provided two separate candidacies for President in the election of 1860, in which the Republican Party gained ascendancy.[43] The radical pro-slavery Fire-Eaters led a walkout both at the April Democratic convention in Charleston's Institute Hall and at the June convention in Baltimore when the national party would not adopt a resolution supporting the extension of slavery into territories even if the voters of those territories did not want it. These Southern Democrats nominated the pro-slavery incumbent Vice President, John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky, for President and General Joseph Lane, former Governor of Oregon, for Vice President. The Northern Democrats nominated Senator Stephen A. Douglas of Illinois for President and former Governor of Georgia Herschel V. Johnson for Vice President while some Southern Democrats joined the Constitutional Union Party, backing its nominees (who had both been prominent Whig leaders), John Bell of Tennessee for President and the politician, statesman and educator Edward Everett of Massachusetts for Vice President. This fracturing of the Democrats led to a Republican victory and Abraham Lincoln was elected the 16th President of the United States.[44]

As the American Civil War broke out, Northern Democrats were divided into War Democrats and Peace Democrats. The Confederate States of America, whose political leadership, mindful of the welter prevalent in antebellum American politics and with a pressing need for unity, largely viewed political parties as inimical to good governance and consequently the Confederacy had none or at least none with the wide organization inherent to other American parties. Most War Democrats rallied to Republican President Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans' National Union Party in the election of 1864, which featured Andrew Johnson on the Republican ticket even though he was a Democrat from the South. Johnson replaced Lincoln in 1865, but he stayed independent of both parties.[45]

The Democrats benefited from white Southerners' resentment of Reconstruction after the war and consequent hostility to the Republican Party. After Redeemers ended Reconstruction in the 1870s and following the often extremely violent disenfranchisement of African Americans led by such white supremacist Democratic politicians as Benjamin Tillman of South Carolina in the 1880s and 1890s, the South, voting Democratic, became known as the "Solid South". Although Republicans won all but two presidential elections, the Democrats remained competitive. The party was dominated by pro-business Bourbon Democrats led by Samuel J. Tilden and Grover Cleveland, who represented mercantile, banking, and railroad interests; opposed imperialism and overseas expansion; fought for the gold standard; opposed bimetallism; and crusaded against corruption, high taxes and tariffs. Cleveland was elected to non-consecutive presidential terms in 1884 and 1892.[46]

Agrarian Democrats demanding free silver overthrew the Bourbon Democrats in 1896 and nominated William Jennings Bryan for the presidency (a nomination repeated by Democrats in 1900 and 1908). Bryan waged a vigorous campaign attacking Eastern moneyed interests, but he lost to Republican William McKinley.[47]

The Democrats took control of the House in 1910 and elected Woodrow Wilson as President in 1912 (when the Republicans split) and 1916. Wilson effectively led Congress to put to rest the issues of tariffs, money and antitrust, which had dominated politics for 40 years, with new progressive laws. He failed to pass the Versailles Treaty (which involved joining the League of Nations).[48] The weak party was deeply divided by issues such as the KKK and prohibition in the 1920s. However, it did organize new ethnic voters in Northern cities.[49]

The Great Depression in 1929 that began under Republican President Herbert Hoover and the Republican Congress set the stage for a more liberal government as the Democrats controlled the House of Representatives nearly uninterrupted from 1930 until 1994 and won most presidential elections until 1968. Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected to the presidency in 1932, came forth with government programs called the New Deal. New Deal liberalism meant the regulation of business (especially finance and banking) and the promotion of labor unions as well as federal spending to aid the unemployed, help distressed farmers and undertake large-scale public works projects. It marked the start of the American welfare state.[50] The opponents, who stressed opposition to unions, support for business and low taxes, started calling themselves "conservatives".[51]

Until the 1980s, the Democratic Party was a coalition of two parties divided by the MasonDixon line: liberal Democrats in the North and culturally conservative voters in the South, who though benefitting from many of the New Deal public works projects opposed increasing civil rights initiatives advocated by Northeastern liberals. The polarization grew stronger after Roosevelt died. Southern Democrats formed a key part of the bipartisan conservative coalition in an alliance with most of the Midwestern Republicans. The economically activist philosophy of Franklin D. Roosevelt, which has strongly influenced American liberalism, shaped much of the party's economic agenda after 1932.[52] From the 1930s to the mid-1960s, the liberal New Deal coalition usually controlled the presidency while the conservative coalition usually controlled Congress.[53]

Issues facing parties and the United States after World War II included the Cold War and the Civil Rights Movement. Republicans attracted conservatives and white Southerners from the Democratic coalition with their use of the Southern strategy and resistance to New Deal and Great Society liberalism. African Americans had traditionally supported the Republican Party because of its anti-slavery civil rights policies. Following the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Southern states became more reliably Republican in presidential politics, while Northeastern states became more reliably Democratic.[54][55][56][57][58][59][60][61] Studies show that Southern whites, which were a core constituency in the Democratic Party, shifted to the Republican Party due to racial conservatism.[60][62][63]

The election of President John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts in 1960 was a partial reflection of this shift. In the campaign, Kennedy attracted a new generation of younger voters. In his agenda dubbed the New Frontier, Kennedy introduced a host of social programs and public works projects, along with enhanced support of the space program, proposing a manned spacecraft trip to the moon by the end of the decade. He pushed for civil rights initiatives and proposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, but with his assassination in November 1963 was not able to see its passage.[64]

Kennedy's successor Lyndon B. Johnson was able to persuade the largely conservative Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and with a more progressive Congress in 1965 passed much of the Great Society, which consisted of an array of social programs designed to help the poor. Kennedy and Johnson's advocacy of civil rights further solidified black support for the Democrats, but had the effect of alienating Southern whites who would eventually gravitate towards the Republican party, particularly after the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980. The United States' involvement in the Vietnam War in the 1960s was another divisive issue that further fractured the fault lines of the Democrats' coalition. After the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964, President Johnson committed a large contingency of combat troops to Vietnam, but the escalation failed to drive the Viet Cong from South Vietnam, resulting in an increasing quagmire, which by 1968 had become the subject of widespread anti-war protests in the United States and elsewhere. With increasing casualties and nightly news reports bringing home troubling images from Vietnam, the costly military engagement became increasingly unpopular, alienating many of the kinds of young voters that the Democrats had attracted the early 1960s. The protests that year along with assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Democratic presidential candidate Senator Robert F. Kennedy (younger brother of John F. Kennedy) climaxed in turbulence at the hotly-contested Democratic National Convention that summer in Chicago (which amongst the ensuing turmoil inside and outside of the convention hall nominated Vice President Hubert Humphrey) in a series of events that proved to mark a significant turning point in the decline of the Democratic party's broad coalition.[65]

Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon was able to capitalize on the Democrat's confusion that year and won the 1968 election to become the 37th president and would win again in 1972 against Democratic nominee George McGovern, who like Robert F. Kennedy reached out to the younger anti-war and counterculture voters, but unlike Kennedy was not able to appeal to the party's more traditional white working-class constituencies. During Nixon's second term, his presidency was rocked by the Watergate scandal, which forced him to resign in 1974, being succeeded by vice president Gerald Ford, who served a brief tenure. Watergate offered the Democrats an opportunity to recoup and their nominee Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election. With the initial support of evangelical Christian voters in the South, Carter was temporarily able to reunite the disparate factions within the party, but inflation and the Iran Hostage Crisis of 19791980 took their toll, resulting in a landslide victory for Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan in 1980, which shifted the tectonic plates of the political landscape in favor of the Republicans for years to come.

With the ascendancy of the Republicans under Ronald Reagan, the Democrats searched for ways to respond yet were unable to succeed by running traditional candidates, such as former Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, who lost to Reagan in the 1984 presidential election. Many Democrats attached their hopes to the future star of Gary Hart, who had challenged Mondale in the 1984 primaries running on a theme of "New Ideas"; and in the subsequent 1988 primaries became the de facto front-runner and virtual "shoe-in" for the Democratic presidential nomination before his campaign was ended by a sex scandal. The party nevertheless began to seek out a younger generation of leaders, who like Hart had been inspired by the pragmatic idealism of John F. Kennedy.[66]

Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was one such figure, who was elected President in 1992 as the Democratic nominee. He labeled himself and governed as a "New Democrat". The party adopted a centrist economic yet socially progressive agenda, with the voter base after Reagan having shifted considerably to the right. In an effort to appeal both to liberals and to fiscal conservatives, Democrats began to advocate for a balanced budget and market economy tempered by government intervention (mixed economy), along with a continued emphasis on social justice and affirmative action. The economic policy adopted by the Democratic Party, including the former Clinton administration, has been referred to as "Third Way". The Democrats lost control of Congress in the election of 1994 to the Republican Party. Re-elected in 1996, Clinton was the first Democratic President since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected to two terms.[67]

In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as well as the growing concern over global warming, some of the party's key issues in the early 21st century have included the methods of how to combat terrorism while preserving human rights, homeland security, expanding access to health care, labor rights, environmentalism and the preservation of liberal government programs. Following twelve years of Republican congressional rule, the Democrats regained majority control of both the House and the Senate in the 2006 elections. Barack Obama won the Democratic Party's nomination and was elected as the first African American president in 2008. The Democrats gained control of both chambers of Congress in the wake of the 2007 economic recession. The Democratic Party under the Obama presidency moved forward reforms including an economic stimulus package, the Dodd-Frank financial reform act, and the Affordable Care Act. In the 2010 elections, the Democratic Party lost control of the House and lost its majority in state legislatures and state governorships. In the 2012 elections, President Obama was re-elected, but the party kept its minority in the House of Representatives and in 2014 the party lost control of the Senate for the first time since 2006. After the 2016 election of Donald Trump, the Democratic Party transitioned into the role of an opposition party and currently hold neither the presidency nor the Senate but won back a majority in the House in the 2018 midterm elections.[68]

According to a Pew Research poll, the Democratic Party has become more socially liberal and secular compared to how it was in 1987.[69] Based on a poll conducted in 2014, Gallup found that 30% of Americans identified as Democrats, 23% as Republicans and 45% as independents.[70] In the same poll, a survey of registered voters stated that 47% identified as Democrats or leaned towards the partythe same poll found that 40% of registered voters identified as Republicans or leaned towards the Republican party.

In 2018, Democratic congressional candidate Tom Malinowski, who was later elected, described the party:

We're now the party of fiscal responsibility in America. We didn't just add $2 trillion to the national debt for that tax cut that Warren Buffett didn't want... We're the party of law enforcement in America; we don't vilify the Federal Bureau of Investigation every single day. We're the party of family values. We don't... take kids from their parents at the border. We're the party of patriotism in America that wants to defend this country against our foreign adversaries.

The donkey party logo remains a well-known symbol for the Democratic Party despite not being the official logo of the party.

The Democratic donkey party logo in a modernized "kicking donkey" form

The Democratic-Republican Party splintered in 1824 into the short-lived National Republican Party and the Jacksonian movement which in 1828 became the Democratic Party. Under the Jacksonian era, the term "The Democracy" was in use by the party, but the name "Democratic Party" was eventually settled upon[72] and became the official name in 1844.[73] Members of the party are called "Democrats" or "Dems".

The term "Democrat Party" has also been in local use, but has usually been used by opponents since 1952 as a disparaging term.

The most common mascot symbol for the party has been the donkey, or jackass.[74] Andrew Jackson's enemies twisted his name to "jackass" as a term of ridicule regarding a stupid and stubborn animal. However, the Democrats liked the common-man implications and picked it up too, therefore the image persisted and evolved.[75] Its most lasting impression came from the cartoons of Thomas Nast from 1870 in Harper's Weekly. Cartoonists followed Nast and used the donkey to represent the Democrats and the elephant to represent the Republicans.

In the early 20th century, the traditional symbol of the Democratic Party in Indiana, Kentucky, Oklahoma and Ohio was the rooster, as opposed to the Republican eagle. This symbol still appears on Oklahoma, Kentucky, Indiana, and West Virginia ballots.[76] The rooster was adopted as the official symbol of the national Democratic Party.[77] In New York, the Democratic ballot symbol is a five-pointed star.[78]

Although both major political parties (and many minor ones) use the traditional American colors of red, white and blue in their marketing and representations, since election night 2000 blue has become the identifying color for the Democratic Party while red has become the identifying color for the Republican Party. That night, for the first time all major broadcast television networks used the same color scheme for the electoral map: blue states for Al Gore (Democratic nominee) and red states for George W. Bush (Republican nominee). Since then, the color blue has been widely used by the media to represent the party. This is contrary to common practice outside of the United States where blue is the traditional color of the right and red the color of the left.[79] For example, in Canada red represents the Liberals while blue represents the Conservatives. In the United Kingdom, red denotes the Labour Party and blue symbolizes the Conservative Party. Blue has also been used both by party supporters for promotional effortsActBlue, BuyBlue and BlueFund as examplesand by the party itself in 2006 both for its "Red to Blue Program", created to support Democratic candidates running against Republican incumbents in the midterm elections that year and on its official website.

In September 2010, the Democratic Party unveiled its new logo, which featured a blue D inside a blue circle. It was the party's first official logo; the donkey logo had only been semi-official.

Jefferson-Jackson Day is the annual fundraising event (dinner) held by Democratic Party organizations across the United States.[80] It is named after Presidents Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson, whom the party regards as its distinguished early leaders.

The song "Happy Days Are Here Again" is the unofficial song of the Democratic Party. It was used prominently when Franklin D. Roosevelt was nominated for president at the 1932 Democratic National Convention and remains a sentimental favorite for Democrats today. For example, Paul Shaffer played the theme on the Late Show with David Letterman after the Democrats won Congress in 2006. "Don't Stop" by Fleetwood Mac was adopted by Bill Clinton's presidential campaign in 1992 and has endured as a popular Democratic song. The emotionally similar song "Beautiful Day" by the band U2 has also become a favorite theme song for Democratic candidates. John Kerry used the song during his 2004 presidential campaign and several Democratic Congressional candidates used it as a celebratory tune in 2006.[81][82]

The 2016 campaign of Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders used the hopeful Simon & Garfunkel song "America" for one of its campaign advertisements,[83] with the complete permission of the still-active duo of popular American musicians.[84] As a traditional anthem for its presidential nominating convention, Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man" is traditionally performed at the beginning of the Democratic National Convention.

The Democratic National Committee (DNC) is responsible for promoting Democratic campaign activities. While the DNC is responsible for overseeing the process of writing the Democratic Platform, the DNC is more focused on campaign and organizational strategy than public policy. In presidential elections, it supervises the Democratic National Convention. The national convention is subject to the charter of the party and the ultimate authority within the Democratic Party when it is in session, with the DNC running the party's organization at other times. The DNC is chaired by former Labor Secretary Tom Perez.[85]

Each state also has a state committee, made up of elected committee members as well as ex officio committee members (usually elected officials and representatives of major constituencies), which in turn elects a chair. County, town, city and ward committees generally are composed of individuals elected at the local level. State and local committees often coordinate campaign activities within their jurisdiction, oversee local conventions and in some cases primaries or caucuses and may have a role in nominating candidates for elected office under state law. Rarely do they have much funding, but in 2005 DNC Chairman Dean began a program (called the "50 State Strategy") of using DNC national funds to assist all state parties and pay for full-time professional staffers.[86]

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) assists party candidates in House races and its current chairman (selected by the party caucus) is Representative Cheri Bustos of Illinois. Similarly, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC), headed by Senator Catherine Cortez Masto of Nevada, raises funds for Senate races. The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee (DLCC), chaired by Oregon legislator Tina Kotek, is a smaller organization with much less funding that focuses on state legislative races. The DNC sponsors the College Democrats of America (CDA), a student-outreach organization with the goal of training and engaging a new generation of Democratic activists. Democrats Abroad is the organization for Americans living outside the United States and they work to advance the goals of the party and encourage Americans living abroad to support the Democrats. The Young Democrats of America (YDA) is a youth-led organization that attempts to draw in and mobilize young people for Democratic candidates but operates outside of the DNC. The Democratic Governors Association (DGA), chaired by Governor Gina Raimondo of Rhode Island,[87] is an organization supporting the candidacies of Democratic gubernatorial nominees and incumbents. Likewise, the mayors of the largest cities and urban centers convene as the National Conference of Democratic Mayors.[citation needed]

Upon foundation, the Democratic Party supported agrarianism and the Jacksonian democracy movement of President Andrew Jackson, representing farmers and rural interests and traditional Jeffersonian democrats.[88] Since the 1890s, especially in northern states, the party began to favor more liberal positions (the term "liberal" in this sense describes modern liberalism, rather than classical liberalism or economic liberalism). In recent exit polls, the Democratic Party has had broad appeal across all socio-ethno-economic demographics.[89][90][91]

Historically, the party has represented farmers, laborers, labor unions and religious and ethnic minorities as it has opposed unregulated business and finance and favored progressive income taxes. In foreign policy, internationalism (including interventionism) was a dominant theme from 1913 to the mid-1960s. In the 1930s, the party began advocating welfare spending programs targeted at the poor. The party had a fiscally conservative, pro-business wing, typified by Grover Cleveland and Al Smith; and a Southern conservative wing that shrank after President Lyndon B. Johnson supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The major influences for liberalism were labor unions (which peaked in the 19361952 era) and the African American wing, which has steadily grown since the 1960s. Since the 1970s, environmentalism has been a major new component.

The Democratic Party, once dominant in the Southeastern United States, is now strongest in the Northeast (Mid-Atlantic and New England), Great Lakes region and the West Coast (including Hawaii). The Democrats are also very strong in major cities (regardless of region).

Social scientists Theodore Caplow et al. argue that "the Democratic party, nationally, moved from left-center toward the center in the 1940s and 1950s, then moved further toward the right-center in the 1970s and 1980s".[92] According to historian Walter Scheidel, both major political parties shifted towards promoting free market capitalism in the 1970s, with Republicans moving further to the political right than Democrats to the political left. He contends Democrats played a significant role in the financial deregulation of the 1990s and have pushed social welfare issues to the periphery while increasingly focusing on issues pertaining to identity politics.[93]

Centrist Democrats, or New Democrats, are an ideologically centrist faction within the Democratic Party that emerged after the victory of Republican George H. W. Bush in the 1988 presidential election. They are an economically liberal and "Third Way" faction which dominated the party for around 20 years starting in the late 1980s after the United States populace turned much further to the political right. They are represented by organizations such as the New Democrat Network and the New Democrat Coalition.

The New Democrat Coalition is a pro-business, pro-growth and fiscally conservative congressional coalition.[94] Compared to other Democratic factions, they are mostly more supportive of the use of military force, including the war in Iraq, are more supportive of free trade and are more willing to reduce government welfare as indicated by their support for welfare reform and tax cuts.[citation needed]

One of the most influential centrist groups was the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a nonprofit organization that advocated centrist positions for the party. The DLC hailed President Bill Clinton as proof of the viability of "Third Way" politicians and a DLC success story. The DLC disbanded in 2011 and much of the former DLC is now represented in the think tank Third Way.[95]

While not representing a majority of the Democratic Party electorate, a decent amount of Democratic elected officials have self-declared as being centrists. Some of these Democrats are former President Bill Clinton, former Vice President Al Gore, Senator Mark Warner, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell, former senator Jim Webb, Vice President Joe Biden, congresswoman Ann Kirkpatrick and former congressman Dave McCurdy.[96][97]

The New Democrat Network supports socially moderate, fiscally conservative Democratic politicians and operates the congressional New Democrat Coalition in the House and Senate.[98] Congressman Ron Kind is the chairperson of the coalition[96] and former senator and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton was a member while in Congress.[99] Before he became President, Senator Barack Obama was self-described as a New Democrat.[100]

A conservative Democrat is a member of the Democratic Party with conservative political views, or with views relatively conservative with respect to those of the national party. While such members of the Democratic Party can be found throughout the nation, actual elected officials are disproportionately found within the Southern states and to a lesser extent within rural regions of the United States generally, more commonly in the West. Historically, Southern Democrats were generally much more ideologically conservative than conservative Democrats are now.

Many conservative Southern Democrats defected to the Republican Party, beginning with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the general leftward shift of the party. Strom Thurmond of South Carolina, Billy Tauzin of Louisiana, Kent Hance and Ralph Hall of Texas and Richard Shelby of Alabama are examples of this. The influx of conservative Democrats into the Republican Party is often cited as a reason for the Republican Party's shift further to the right during the late 20th century as well as the shift of its base from the Northeast and Midwest to the South.

Into the 1980s, the Democratic Party had a conservative element, mostly from the South and Border regions. Their numbers declined sharply as the Republican Party built up its Southern base. They were sometimes humorously called "Yellow dog Democrats", or "boll weevils" and "Dixiecrats". In the House, they form the Blue Dog Coalition, a caucus of fiscal conservatives and social conservatives and moderates, primarily Southerners, willing to broker compromises with the Republican leadership. They have acted as a unified voting bloc in the past, giving its members some ability to change legislation, depending on their numbers in Congress.

There was a split vote among many conservative Southern Democrats in the 1970s and 1980s. Some supported local and statewide conservative Democrats while simultaneously voting for Republican presidential candidates.[101]

Social liberals (modern liberals) and progressives constitute the majority of the Democratic voter base. Liberals thereby form the largest united demographic within the Democratic base. According to the 2012 exit poll results, liberals constituted 25% of the electorate, and 86% of American liberals favored the candidate of the Democratic Party.[102] White-collar college-educated professionals were mostly Republican until the 1950s, but they now compose a vital component of the Democratic Party.[103]

A large majority of liberals favor moving toward universal health care, with many supporting a single-payer system. A majority also favor diplomacy over military action, stem cell research, the legalization of same-sex marriage, stricter gun control and environmental protection laws as well as the preservation of abortion rights. Immigration and cultural diversity is deemed positive as liberals favor cultural pluralism, a system in which immigrants retain their native culture in addition to adopting their new culture. They tend to be divided on free trade agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and organizations, with some seeing them as more favorable to corporations than workers. Most liberals oppose increased military spending and the mixing of church and state.[104]

This ideological group differs from the traditional organized labor base. According to the Pew Research Center, a plurality of 41% resided in mass affluent households and 49% were college graduates, the highest figure of any typographical group. It was also the fastest growing typological group between the late 1990s and early 2000s.[104] Liberals include most of academia[105] and large portions of the professional class.[89][90][91]

Progressives are the most left-leaning, pro-labor union faction in the party who have long supported a strong regulation of business, social-welfare programs and workers' rights.[106][107] Many progressive Democrats are descendants of the New Left of Democratic presidential candidate Senator George McGovern of South Dakota whereas others were involved in the 2016 presidential candidacy of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders.

In 2014, progressive Senator Elizabeth Warren set out an "Eleven Commandments of Progressivism", being tougher regulation on corporations, affordable education, scientific investment and environmentalism, net neutrality, increased wages, equal pay, collective bargaining rights, defending social safety-net programs, marriage equality, immigration reform and unabridged access to reproductive healthcare.[108] Additionally, progressives strongly oppose political corruption and therefore seek to advance electoral reform including campaign finance reform and voting rights.[109] Today, many progressives have made a fight against economic inequality their top priority.[110] Progressives are generally considered to be synonymous with liberals, though the two groups differ on a variety of issues,[111] such as progressives' stronger support for universal healthcare, solutions for economic inequality, and stronger environmental regulations. Progressives tend to be seen as closer to the ideology of European social-democratic parties than mainstream or establishment liberals.[112]

The Congressional Progressive Caucus is a caucus of progressive Democrats and is the single largest Democratic caucus in the House of Representatives. Its current chairs are Mark Pocan of Wisconsin and Pramila Jayapal of Washington.[113] Its members have included Representatives Dennis Kucinich of Ohio, John Conyers of Michigan, Jim McDermott of Washington, John Lewis of Georgia, Barbara Lee of California and the late Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota. Senators Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, Mazie Hirono of Hawaii and Ed Markey of Massachusetts were all members of the caucus when in the House of Representatives. Today, no Democratic Senators belong to the Progressive Caucus, but independent Senator Bernie Sanders is a member.

Equal economic opportunity, a base social safety net provided by the welfare state and strong labor unions have historically been at the heart of Democratic economic policy.[26] The welfare state supports a progressive tax system, higher minimum wages, social security, universal health care, public education and public housing.[26] They also support infrastructure development and government-sponsored employment programs in an effort to achieve economic development and job creation while stimulating private sector job creation.[133] Additionally, since the 1990s the party has at times supported centrist economic reforms, which cut the size of government and reduced market regulations.[134] The party has continuously rejected laissez-faire economics as well as market socialism, instead favoring Keynesian economics within a capitalist market-based system.[citation needed]

Democrats support a more progressive tax structure to provide more services and reduce economic inequality by making sure that the wealthiest Americans pay the highest amount in taxes.[135] Democrats support more government spending on social services while spending less on the military.[136][137] They oppose the cutting of social services, such as Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and various other welfare programs,[138] believing it to be harmful to efficiency and social justice. Democrats believe the benefits of social services in monetary and non-monetary terms are a more productive labor force and cultured population and believe that the benefits of this are greater than any benefits that could be derived from lower taxes, especially on top earners, or cuts to social services. Furthermore, Democrats see social services as essential towards providing positive freedom, i.e. freedom derived from economic opportunity. The Democratic-led House of Representatives reinstated the PAYGO (pay-as-you-go) budget rule at the start of the 110th Congress.[139]

The Democratic Party favors raising the minimum wage. They call for a $10.10/hour national minimum wage and think the minimum wage should be adjusted regularly.[140] The Fair Minimum Wage Act of 2007 was an early component of the Democrats' agenda during the 110th Congress. In 2006, the Democrats supported six state ballot initiatives to increase the minimum wage and all six initiatives passed.[141] In May 2017, Senate Democrats introduced the Raise the Wage Act which would raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2024 and marks a leftward turn in Democratic economic policies.[142]

Democrats call for "affordable and quality health care" and many advocate an expansion of government intervention in this area. Many Democrats favor national health insurance or universal health care in a variety of forms to address the rising costs of modern health insurance. Some Democrats, such as former Representatives John Conyers and John Dingell, have called for a single-payer program of Medicare for All. The Progressive Democrats of America, a group operating inside the Democratic Party, has made single-payer universal health care one of their primary policy goals.[143] The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama on March 23, 2010, has been one of the most significant pushes for universal health care to become a reality. By April 2014, more than 10 million Americans had enrolled in health care coverage since the launch of the Affordable Care Act.[144]

Democrats favor improving public education by raising school standards and reforming the head start program. They also support universal preschool and expanding access to primary education, including through charter schools. They call for slashes in student loan debt and support reforms to force down tuition fees.[145] Other proposed reforms have included nationwide universal preschool education, tuition-free college and reform of standardized testing. Democrats have the long-term aim of having low-cost, publicly funded college education with low tuition fees (like in much of Europe and Canada), which should be available to every eligible American student. Alternatively, they encourage expanding access to post-secondary education by increasing state funding for student financial aid such as Pell Grants and college tuition tax deductions.[146]

Democrats believe that the government should protect the environment and have a history of environmentalism. In more recent years, this stance has had as its emphasis alternative energy generation as the basis for an improved economy, greater national security and general environmental benefits.[147]

The Democratic Party also favors expansion of conservation lands and encourages open space and rail travel to relieve highway and airport congestion and improve air quality and economy as it "believe[s] that communities, environmental interests, and the government should work together to protect resources while ensuring the vitality of local economies. Once Americans were led to believe they had to make a choice between the economy and the environment. They now know this is a false choice".[148]

The most important environmental concern of the Democratic Party is climate change. Democrats, most notably former Vice President Al Gore, have pressed for stern regulation of greenhouse gases. On October 15, 2007, he won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to build greater knowledge about man-made climate change and laying the foundations for the measures needed to counteract these changes asserting that "the climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity".[149]

Democrats have supported increased domestic renewable energy development, including wind and solar power farms, in an effort to reduce carbon pollution. The party's platform calls for an "all of the above" energy policy including clean energy, natural gas and domestic oil, with the desire of becoming energy independent.[141] The party has supported higher taxes on oil companies and increased regulations on coal power plants, favoring a policy of reducing long-term reliance on fossil fuels.[150][151] Additionally, the party supports stricter fuel emissions standards to prevent air pollution.

Many Democrats support fair trade policies when it comes to the issue of international trade agreements and some in the party have started supporting free trade in recent decades.[152] In the 1990s, the Clinton administration and a number of prominent Democrats pushed through a number of agreements such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Since then, the party's shift away from free trade became evident in the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) vote, with 15 House Democrats voting for the agreement and 187 voting against.[153][154]

The modern Democratic party emphasizes egalitarianism and social equality through liberalism. They support voting rights and minority rights, including LGBT rights, multiculturalism and religious secularism. A longstanding social policy is upholding civil rights, which affect ethnic and racial minorities and includes voting rights, equal opportunity and racial equality. The party championed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which for the first time outlawed segregation. Democrats made civil rights and anti-racism a core party philosophy. Carmines and Stimson say that "the Democratic Party appropriated racial liberalism and assumed federal responsibility for ending racial discrimination".[155][156][157]

Ideological social elements in the party include cultural liberalism, civil libertarianism and feminism. Other Democratic social policies are internationalism, open immigration, electoral reform and women's reproductive rights.

The Democratic Party supports equal opportunity for all Americans regardless of sex, age, race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, religion, creed, or national origin. Many Democrats support affirmative action programs to further this goal. Democrats also strongly support the Americans with Disabilities Act to prohibit discrimination against people based on physical or mental disability. As such, the Democrats pushed as well the ADA Amendments Act of 2008, a legal expansion that became law.[158]

The party is very supportive of improving voting rights as well as election accuracy and accessibility.[159] They support ending voter ID laws and increasing voting time, including making election day a holiday. They support reforming the electoral system to eliminate gerrymandering as well as passing comprehensive campaign finance reform.[29] They supported the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and as a party have often been pioneers for democracy in the United States.[130]

The Democratic Party believe that all women should have access to birth control and support public funding of contraception for poor women. In its national platforms from 1992 to 2004, the Democratic Party has called for abortion to be "safe, legal and rare"namely, keeping it legal by rejecting laws that allow governmental interference in abortion decisions and reducing the number of abortions by promoting both knowledge of reproduction and contraception and incentives for adoption. The wording changed in the 2008 platform. When Congress voted on the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act in 2003, Congressional Democrats were split, with a minority (including former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid) supporting the ban and the majority of Democrats opposing the legislation.[160]

The Democratic Party opposes attempts to reverse the 1973 Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, which declared abortion covered by the constitutionally protected individual right to privacy under the Ninth Amendment; and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which lays out the legal framework in which government action alleged to violate that right is assessed by courts. As a matter of the right to privacy and of gender equality, many Democrats believe all women should have the ability to choose to abort without governmental interference. They believe that each woman, conferring with her conscience, has the right to choose for herself whether abortion is morally correct.

Former Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid identified himself as "pro-life", Former President Jimmy Carter has expressed his view of abortion and his wish to see the Democratic Party becoming more pro-life:[161] while President Barack Obama and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi self-identify as "pro-choice". Groups such as Democrats for Life of America represent the pro-life faction of the party while groups such as EMILY's List represent the pro-choice faction. A Newsweek poll from October 2006 found that 25% of Democrats were pro-life while a 69% majority was pro-choice.[162]

The 2016 Democratic Party platform expresses support for "'a woman's right to safe and legal abortion' and enumerates no limits on that right."[163] It further calls for the repeal of the Hyde Amendment, which prohibits the use of federal tax dollars for elective abortions.[164]

Many Democratic politicians have called for systematic reform of the immigration system such that residents that have come into the United States illegally have a pathway to legal citizenship. President Obama remarked in November 2013 that he felt it was "long past time to fix our broken immigration system", particularly to allow "incredibly bright young people" that came over as students to become full citizens. The Public Religion Research Institute found in a late 2013 study that 73% of Democrats supported the pathway concept, compared to 63% of Americans as a whole.[165]

In 2013, Democrats in the Senate passed S.744, which would reform immigration policy to allow citizenship for illegal immigrants in the United States and improve the lives of all immigrants currently living in the United States.[166]

The Democratic Party is supportive of LGBT rights. Most support for same-sex marriage in the United States has come from Democrats, although some favor civil unions instead or oppose same-sex marriage. Support for same-sex marriage has increased in the past decade according to ABC News. An April 2009 ABC News/Washington Post public opinion poll put support among Democrats at 62%[167] whereas a June 2008 Newsweek poll found that 42% of Democrats support same-sex marriage while 23% support civil unions or domestic partnership laws and 28% oppose any legal recognition at all.[168] A broad majority of Democrats have supported other LGBT-related laws such as extending hate crime statutes, legally preventing discrimination against LGBT people in the workforce and repealing Don't ask, don't tell. A 2006 Pew Research Center poll of Democrats found that 55% supported gays adopting children with 40% opposed while 70% support gays in the military, with only 23% opposed.[169] Gallup polling from May 2009 stated that 82% of Democrats support open enlistment.[170]

The 2004 Democratic National Platform stated that marriage should be defined at the state level and it repudiated the Federal Marriage Amendment.[171] While not stating support of same-sex marriage, the 2008 platform called for repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act, which banned federal recognition of same-sex marriage and removed the need for interstate recognition, supported antidiscrimination laws and the extension of hate crime laws to LGBT people and opposed the Don't ask, don't tell military policy.[172] The 2012 platform included support for same-sex marriage and for the repeal of DOMA.[30]

On May 9, 2012, Barack Obama became the first sitting President to say he supports same-sex marriage.[173][174] Previously, he had opposed restrictions on same-sex marriage such as the Defense of Marriage Act, which he promised to repeal,[175] California's Prop 8,[176] and a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage (which he opposed saying that "decisions about marriage should be left to the states as they always have been"),[177] but also stated that he personally believed marriage to be between a man and a woman and that he favored civil unions that would "give same-sex couples equal legal rights and privileges as married couples".[175] Earlier, when running for the Illinois Senate in 1996 he said that he "unequivocally support(ed) gay marriage" and "favor(ed) legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages".[178] Senator John Kerry, Democratic presidential candidate in 2004, did not support same-sex marriage. Former presidents Bill Clinton[179] and Jimmy Carter[180] and former Vice Presidents Joe Biden, Al Gore[181] and Walter Mondale[182] also support gay marriage.

The 2016 Democratic Party platform declares: "We are committed to addressing the extraordinary challenges faced by our fellow citizens in Puerto Rico. Many stem from the fundamental question of Puerto Rico's political status. Democrats believe that the people of Puerto Rico should determine their ultimate political status from permanent options that do not conflict with the Constitution, laws, and policies of the United States. Democrats are committed to promoting economic opportunity and good-paying jobs for the hardworking people of Puerto Rico. We also believe that Puerto Ricans must be treated equally by Medicare, Medicaid, and other programs that benefit families. Puerto Ricans should be able to vote for the people who make their laws, just as they should be treated equally. All American citizens, no matter where they reside, should have the right to vote for the President of the United States. Finally, we believe that federal officials must respect Puerto Rico's local self-government as laws are implemented and Puerto Rico's budget and debt are restructured so that it can get on a path towards stability and prosperity".[183]

With a stated goal of reducing crime and homicide, the Democratic Party has introduced various gun control measures, most notably the Gun Control Act of 1968, the Brady Bill of 1993 and Crime Control Act of 1994. However, some Democrats, especially rural, Southern, and Western Democrats, favor fewer restrictions on firearm possession and warned the party was defeated in the 2000 presidential election in rural areas because of the issue.[184] In the national platform for 2008, the only statement explicitly favoring gun control was a plan calling for renewal of the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban.[185]

The Democratic Party supports the death penalty far less than the Republican Party. Although most Democrats in Congress have never seriously moved to overturn the rarely used federal death penalty, both Russ Feingold and Dennis Kucinich have introduced such bills with little success. Democrats have led efforts to overturn state death penalty laws, particularly in New Jersey and in New Mexico. They have also sought to prevent the reinstatement of the death penalty in those states which prohibit it, including Massachusetts and New York. During the Clinton administration, Democrats led the expansion of the federal death penalty. These efforts resulted in the passage of the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, signed into law by President Clinton, which heavily limited appeals in death penalty cases.

In 1992, 1993 and 1995, Democratic Texas Congressman Henry Gonzlez unsuccessfully introduced the Death Penalty Abolition Amendment which prohibited the use of capital punishment in the United States. Democratic Missouri Congressman William Lacy Clay, Sr. cosponsored the amendment in 1993.

During his Illinois Senate career, former President Barack Obama successfully introduced legislation intended to reduce the likelihood of wrongful convictions in capital cases, requiring videotaping of confessions. When campaigning for the presidency, Obama stated that he supports the limited use of the death penalty, including for people who have been convicted of raping a minor under the age of 12, having opposed the Supreme Court's ruling in Kennedy v. Louisiana that the death penalty was unconstitutional in child rape cases.[186] Obama has stated that he thinks the "death penalty does little to deter crime" and that it is used too frequently and too inconsistently.[187]

In June 2016, the Democratic Platform Drafting Committee unanimously adopted an amendment to abolish the death penalty, marking the first time the party had done so in its history.[188]

Many Democrats are opposed to the use of torture against individuals apprehended and held prisoner by the United States military and hold that categorizing such prisoners as unlawful combatants does not release the United States from its obligations under the Geneva Conventions. Democrats contend that torture is inhumane, decreases the United States' moral standing in the world and produces questionable results. Democrats largely spoke out against waterboarding.[citation needed]

Torture became a very divisive issue in the party after Barack Obama was elected President. Many centrist Democrats and members of the party's leadership supported the use of torture while the liberal wings continued to be steadfastly opposed to it.[189]

Many Democrats are opposed to the Patriot Act, but when the law was passed most Democrats were supportive of it and all but two Democrats in the Senate voted for the original Patriot Act legislation in 2001. The lone nay vote was from Russ Feingold of Wisconsin as Mary Landrieu of Louisiana did not vote.[190] In the House, the Democrats voted for the Act by 145 yea and 62 nay. Democrats split on the renewal in 2006. In the Senate, Democrats voted 34 for the 2006 renewal and nine against. In the House, Democrats voted 66 voted for the renewal, and 124 against.[citation needed]

The Democratic Party believes that individuals should have a right to privacy. For example, many Democrats have opposed the NSA warrantless surveillance of American citizens.

Some Democratic officeholders have championed consumer protection laws that limit the sharing of consumer data between corporations. Most Democrats oppose sodomy laws and believe that government should not regulate consensual noncommercial sexual conduct among adults as a matter of personal privacy.[191]

The foreign policy of the voters of the two major parties has largely overlapped since the 1990s. A Gallup poll in early 2013 showed broad agreement on the top issues, albeit with some divergence regarding human rights and international cooperation through agencies such as the United Nations.[192]

In June 2014, the Quinnipiac Poll asked Americans which foreign policy they preferred:

A) The United States is doing too much in other countries around the world, and it is time to do less around the world and focus more on our own problems here at home.

B) The United States must continue to push forward to promote democracy and freedom in other countries around the world because these efforts make our own country more secure.

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Democratic Party (United States) - Wikipedia

History

The Democratic Party is the oldest political party in the United States and among the oldest political parties in the world. It traces its roots to 1792, when followers of Thomas Jefferson adopted the name Republican to emphasize their anti-monarchical views. The Republican Party, also known as the Jeffersonian Republicans, advocated a decentralized government with limited powers. Another faction to emerge in the early years of the republic, the Federalist Party, led by Alexander Hamilton, favoured a strong central government. Jeffersons faction developed from the group of Anti-Federalists who had agitated in favour of the addition of a Bill of Rights to the Constitution of the United States. The Federalists called Jeffersons faction the Democratic-Republican Party in an attempt to identify it with the disorder spawned by the radical democrats of the French Revolution of 1789. After the Federalist John Adams was elected president in 1796, the Republican Party served as the countrys first opposition party, and in 1798 the Republicans adopted the derisive Democratic-Republican label as their official name.

In 1800 Adams was defeated by Jefferson, whose victory ushered in a period of prolonged Democratic-Republican dominance. Jefferson won reelection easily in 1804, and Democratic-Republicans James Madison (1808 and 1812) and James Monroe (1816 and 1820) were also subsequently elected. By 1820 the Federalist Party had faded from national politics, leaving the Democratic-Republicans as the countrys sole major party and allowing Monroe to run unopposed in that years presidential election.

During the 1820s new states entered the union, voting laws were relaxed, and several states passed legislation that provided for the direct election of presidential electors by voters (electors had previously been appointed by state legislatures). These changes split the Democratic-Republicans into factions, each of which nominated its own candidate in the presidential election of 1824. The partys congressional caucus nominated William H. Crawford of Georgia, but Andrew Jackson and John Quincy Adams, the leaders of the partys two largest factions, also sought the presidency; Henry Clay, the speaker of the House of Representatives, was nominated by the Kentucky and Tennessee legislatures. Jackson won the most popular and electoral votes, but no candidate received the necessary majority in the electoral college. When the election went to the House of Representatives (as stipulated in the Constitution), Claywho had finished fourth and was thus eliminated from considerationthrew his support to Adams, who won the House vote and subsequently appointed Clay secretary of state.

Despite Adamss victory, differences between the Adams and the Jackson factions persisted. Adamss supporters, representing Eastern interests, called themselves the National Republicans. Jackson, whose strength lay in the South and West, referred to his followers simply as Democrats (or as Jacksonian Democrats). Jackson defeated Adams in the 1828 presidential election. In 1832 in Baltimore, Maryland, at one of the countrys first national political conventions (the first convention had been held the previous year by the Anti-Masonic Movement), the Democrats nominated Jackson for president, drafted a party platform, and established a rule that required party presidential and vice presidential nominees to receive the votes of at least two-thirds of the national convention delegates. This rule, which was not repealed until 1936, effectively ceded veto power in the selection process to minority factions, and it often required conventions to hold dozens of ballots to determine a presidential nominee. (The partys presidential candidate in 1924, John W. Davis, needed more than 100 ballots to secure the nomination.) Jackson easily won reelection in 1832, but his various opponentswho derisively referred to him as King Andrewjoined with former National Republicans to form the Whig Party, named for the English political faction that had opposed absolute monarchy in the 17th century (see Whig and Tory).

From 1828 to 1856 the Democrats won all but two presidential elections (1840 and 1848). During the 1840s and 50s, however, the Democratic Party, as it officially named itself in 1844, suffered serious internal strains over the issue of extending slavery to the Western territories. Southern Democrats, led by Jefferson Davis, wanted to allow slavery in all the territories, while Northern Democrats, led by Stephen A. Douglas, proposed that each territory should decide the question for itself through referendum. The issue split the Democrats at their 1860 presidential convention, where Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge and Northern Democrats nominated Douglas. The 1860 election also included John Bell, the nominee of the Constitutional Union Party, and Abraham Lincoln, the candidate of the newly established (1854) antislavery Republican Party (which was unrelated to Jeffersons Republican Party of decades earlier). With the Democrats hopelessly split, Lincoln was elected president with only about 40 percent of the national vote; in contrast, Douglas and Breckinridge won 29 percent and 18 percent of the vote, respectively.

The election of 1860 is regarded by most political observers as the first of the countrys three critical electionscontests that produced sharp yet enduring changes in party loyalties across the country. (Some scholars also identify the 1824 election as a critical election.) It established the Democratic and Republican parties as the major parties in what was ostensibly a two-party system. In federal elections from the 1870s to the 1890s, the parties were in rough balanceexcept in the South, where the Democrats dominated because most whites blamed the Republican Party for both the American Civil War (186165) and the Reconstruction (186577) that followed; the two parties controlled Congress for almost equal periods through the rest of the 19th century, though the Democratic Party held the presidency only during the two terms of Grover Cleveland (188589 and 189397). Repressive legislation and physical intimidation designed to prevent newly enfranchised African Americans from votingdespite passage of the Fifteenth Amendmentensured that the South would remain staunchly Democratic for nearly a century (see black code). During Clevelands second term, however, the United States sank into an economic depression. The party at this time was basically conservative and agrarian-oriented, opposing the interests of big business (especially protective tariffs) and favouring cheap-money policies, which were aimed at maintaining low interest rates.

In the countrys second critical election, in 1896, the Democrats split disastrously over the free-silver and Populist program of their presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan. Bryan lost by a wide margin to Republican William McKinley, a conservative who supported high tariffs and money based only on gold. From 1896 to 1932 the Democrats held the presidency only during the two terms of Woodrow Wilson (191321), and even Wilsons presidency was considered somewhat of a fluke. Wilson won in 1912 because the Republican vote was divided between President William Howard Taft (the official party nominee) and former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, the candidate of the new Bull Moose Party. Wilson championed various progressive economic reforms, including the breaking up of business monopolies and broader federal regulation of banking and industry. Although he led the United States into World War I to make the world safe for democracy, Wilsons brand of idealism and internationalism proved less attractive to voters during the spectacular prosperity of the 1920s than the Republicans frank embrace of big business. The Democrats lost decisively the presidential elections of 1920, 1924, and 1928.

The countrys third critical election, in 1932, took place in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929 and in the midst of the Great Depression. Led by Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrats not only regained the presidency but also replaced the Republicans as the majority party throughout the countryin the North as well as the South. Through his political skills and his sweeping New Deal social programs, such as social security and the statutory minimum wage, Roosevelt forged a broad coalitionincluding small farmers, Northern city dwellers, organized labour, European immigrants, liberals, intellectuals, and reformersthat enabled the Democratic Party to retain the presidency until 1952 and to control both houses of Congress for most of the period from the 1930s to the mid-1990s. Roosevelt was reelected in 1936, 1940, and 1944; he was the only president to be elected to more than two terms. Upon his death in 1945 he was succeeded by his vice president, Harry S. Truman, who was narrowly elected in 1948.

Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower, the supreme Allied commander during World War II, won overwhelming victories against Democrat Adlai E. Stevenson in the presidential elections of 1952 and 1956. The Democrats regained the White House in the election of 1960, when John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Eisenhowers vice president, Richard M. Nixon. The Democrats championing of civil rights and racial desegregation under Truman, Kennedy, and especially Lyndon B. Johnsonwho secured passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965cost the party the traditional allegiance of many of its Southern supporters. Moreover, the pursuit of civil rights legislation dramatically split the partys legislators along regional lines in the 1950s and 60s, with Southern senators famously conducting a protracted filibuster in an ultimately futile attempt to block passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Although Johnson defeated Republican Barry M. Goldwater by a landslide in 1964, his national support waned because of bitter opposition to the Vietnam War, and he chose not to run for reelection. Following the assassination of Robert F. Kennedy in 1968, the party nominated Johnsons vice president, Hubert H. Humphrey, at a fractious convention in Chicago that was marred by violence outside the hall between police and protesters. Meanwhile, many Southern Democrats supported the candidacy of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, an opponent of federally mandated racial integration. In the 1968 election Humphrey was soundly defeated by Nixon in the electoral college (among Southern states Humphrey carried only Texas), though he lost the popular vote by only a narrow margin.

From 1972 to 1988 the Democrats lost four of five presidential elections. In 1972 the party nominated antiwar candidate George S. McGovern, who lost to Nixon in one of the biggest landslides in U.S. electoral history. Two years later the Watergate scandal forced Nixons resignation, enabling Jimmy Carter, then the Democratic governor of Georgia, to defeat Gerald R. Ford, Nixons successor, in 1976. Although Carter orchestrated the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel, his presidency was plagued by a sluggish economy and by the crisis over the kidnapping and prolonged captivity of U.S. diplomats in Iran following the Islamic revolution there in 1979. Carter was defeated in 1980 by conservative Republican Ronald W. Reagan, who was easily reelected in 1984 against Carters vice president, Walter F. Mondale. Mondales running mate, Geraldine A. Ferraro, was the first female candidate on a major-party ticket. Reagans vice president, George Bush, defeated Massachusetts Governor Michael S. Dukakis in 1988. Despite its losses in the presidential elections of the 1970s and 80s, the Democratic Party continued to control both houses of Congress for most of the period (although the Republicans controlled the Senate from 1981 to 1987).

In 1992 Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton recaptured the White House for the Democrats by defeating Bush and third-party candidate Ross Perot. Clintons support of international trade agreements (e.g., the North American Free Trade Agreement) and his willingness to cut spending on social programs to reduce budget deficits alienated the left wing of his party and many traditional supporters in organized labour. In 1994 the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress, in part because of public disenchantment with Clintons health care plan. During Clintons second term the country experienced a period of prosperity not seen since the 1920s, but a scandal involving Clintons relationship with a White House intern led to his impeachment by the House of Representatives in 1998; he was acquitted by the Senate in 1999. Al Gore, Clintons vice president, easily won the Democratic presidential nomination in 2000. In the general election, Gore won 500,000 more popular votes than Republican George W. Bush but narrowly lost in the electoral college after the Supreme Court of the United States ordered a halt to the manual recounting of disputed ballots in Florida. The partys nominee in 2004, John Kerry, was narrowly defeated by Bush in the popular and electoral vote.

Aided by the growing opposition to the Iraq War (200311), the Democrats regained control of the Senate and the House following the 2006 midterm elections. This marked the first time in some 12 years that the Democrats held a majority in both houses of Congress. In the general election of 2008 the partys presidential nominee, Barack Obama, defeated Republican John McCain, thereby becoming the first African American to be elected president of the United States. The Democrats also increased their majority in the Senate and the House. The party scored another victory in mid-2009, when an eight-month legal battle over one of Minnesotas Senate seats concluded with the election of Al Franken, a member of the states Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party. With Franken in office, Democrats in the Senate (supported by the chambers two independents) would be able to exercise a filibuster-proof 6040 majority. In January 2010 the Democrats lost this filibuster-proof majority when the Democratic candidate lost the special election to fill the unexpired term of Ted Kennedy following his death.

The Democrats dominance of Congress proved short-lived, as a swing of some 60 seats (the largest since 1948) returned control of the House to the Republicans in the 2010 midterm election. The Democrats held on to their majority in the Senate, though that majority also was dramatically reduced. Many of the Democrats who had come into office in the 2006 and 2010 elections were defeated, but so too were a number of longtime officeholders; incumbents felt the sting of an electorate that was anxious about the struggling economy and high unemployment. The election also was widely seen as a referendum on the policies of the Obama administration, which were vehemently opposed by a populist upsurge in and around the Republican Party known as the Tea Party movement.

The Democratic Party fared better in the 2012 general election, with Obama defeating his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney. The 2012 election did not significantly change the distribution of power between the two main parties in Congress. While the Democrats retained their majority in the Senate, they were unable to retake the House of Representatives. The Republicans retook the Senate during the 2014 midterm elections.

In the 2016 presidential race, Democrats selected Hillary Clinton as their nominee, the first time a major party in the United States had a woman at the top of its presidential ticket. Despite winning the popular vote by almost three million ballots, Clinton failed to take enough states in the electoral college, and the presidency was won by Republican Donald J. Trump in one of the largest upsets in U.S. electoral history. Moreover, the Republican Party maintained control of both chambers of Congress in the 2016 election. In the midterms two years later, however, Democrats retook the House in what some described as a blue wave.

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Democratic Party | History, Definition, & Beliefs | Britannica