Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Democratic Party (United States)" in English language version.
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In that spirit, Fanfare for the Common Man opened the Democratic National Convention at which Carter's candidacy was announced on July 12, 1976 at Madison Square Garden in New York.
An additional analysis shows that cities with greater attention to the sustainability-equity nexus tend to lean toward the center-left Democratic Party, to have higher education and income, and to have sustainability offices.
But its birth was hardly painless. The stunning electoral energy behind Zohran Mamdani, New York's dashing new Mayor-elect, has blasted the centre-left Democratic Party from the funk in which it has wallowed since 2016.
{{cite book}}: ISBN / Date incompatibility (help)Modern liberalism occupies the left-of-center in the traditional political spectrum and is represented by the Democratic Party in the United States.
Including the American Democratic Party in a comparative analysis of center-left parties is unorthodox, since unlike Europe, America has not produced a socialist movement tied to a strong union movement. Yet the Democrats may have become center-left before anyone else, obliged by their different historical trajectory to build complex alliances with social groups other than the working class and to deal with unusually powerful capitalists ... Taken together, the three chapters devoted to the United States show that the center-left in America faces much the same set of problems as elsewhere and, especially in light of the election results from 2008, that the Democratic Party's potential to win elections, despite its current slide in approval, may be at least equal to that of any center-left party in Europe ... Despite the setback in the 2010 midterms, together the foregoing trends have put the Democrats in a position to eventually build a dominant center-left majority in the United States.
In the corporate governance area, the center-left repositioned itself to press for reform. The Democratic Party in the United States used the postbubble scandals and the collapse of share prices to attack the Republican Party ... Corporate governance reform fit surprisingly well within the contours of the center-left ideology. The Democratic Party and the SPD have both been committed to the development of the regulatory state as a counterweight to managerial authority, corporate power, and market failure.
By the 1840s, Whig and Democratic congressmen voted as rival blocs. Whigs supported and Democrats opposed a weak executive, a new Bank of the United States, a high tariff, distribution of land revenues to the states, relief legislation to mitigate the effects of the depression, and federal reapportionment of House seats. Whigs voted against and Democrats approved an independent treasury, an aggressive foreign policy, and expansionism. These were important issues, capable of dividing the electorate just as they divided the major parties in Congress.
The Democratic Party is, as it has been for many decades now, a center-left party and not a left-wing party in the style of European political parties.
Democrats have become the home of highly-educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees who increasingly distrust teachers, scientists, journalists, universities, non-profit organizations, and even corporations.
The data in Table 3 show that ideology had a powerful influence on vote choice in the 2020 presidential election. Almost all white voters located to the left of center on the ideology scale, regardless of education, voted for Biden, while almost all white voters located to the right of center, regardless of education, voted for Trump. Those in the center, just over one-fifth of white voters, favored Biden overall by a margin of 57% to 43%. However, there is little evidence that economic insecurity had any impact on the candidate preferences of even this group. Finally, it is worth noting that after controlling for ideology, there is almost no remaining difference between the candidate preferences of college and non-college whites. The class divide in candidate preference among white voters in 2020 is almost entirely explained by the fact that non-college white voters are now far more conservative across the board than are white college graduates.
As part of capturing the Senate this year, Republicans knocked out the final remaining Democratic senators from a group of 20 states that have consistently voted Republican for president since at least the 2000 election. A quarter-century ago, Democrats held nearly a third of the Senate seats from these 20 states. But that tally was down to just 2 leading into this election, and Republican victories in Montana and West Virginia reduced it to 0.
The Democrats were the pro-trade party. They represented agriculture-exporting states.
I think we're in decline because mass democracies work best in the center, in the moderate center, when you had a center-right Republican Party and a center-left Democratic Party.
See Appendix B.
In power, the options taken by the centrist Democratic Party in the US and Labour Party in the UK have been insufficient, seeking only the better management of neo-liberalism, remaining bound to its infinite concept of 'growth' and to the markets, trying to reinject the social in homeopathic amounts, whilst apologising for the economic realities of the system and managing financial expectations.
Centrist parties such as the Democratic Party in the USA, have mirrored this limited horizon, offering little more than symbolic gestures of liberal inclusion, while openly serving oligarchic power.
Berman argues that "liberal technocrats"—professionally trained public servants who identified with a centrist Democratic Party—brought postwar neoclassical economics' obsession with efficiency into government.
A new convention could serve as a platform that would enable progressives to go far beyond the moderation of the centrist Democratic Party to disseminate political ideas that otherwise...
Myles' support for Clinton jars with the broader attacks, implicit in the case of "Acceptance Speech" and explicit in the case of "Letter for East River Park," of the centrist Democratic Party and the place of representative democracy in the United States.
What are we to make of American parties at the dawn of the twenty-first century? ... The impact of the 1960s civil rights revolution has been to create two more ideologically coherent parties: a generally liberal or center-left party and a conservative party.
We conclude by considering why Democrats have taken this course, why they are not perceived as having done so, and why, at this fraught juncture for American democratic capitalism, political scientists could learn much from closer examination of the rich world's largest center-left party.
It is clear that the Democratic Party—the center-left United States political party—does enact some forms of a redistributive economic policy agenda.
An additional analysis shows that cities with greater attention to the sustainability-equity nexus tend to lean toward the center-left Democratic Party, to have higher education and income, and to have sustainability offices.
Even more starkly, researchers have shown that relying only on descriptive representation may in fact lead to lower substantive representation of minority groups by reducing the overall number of centre-left Democratic party members who substantively represent ethnic and racial minorities interests in Congress (Cameron et al., 1996;Epstein & O'Halloran, 1999).
The events of 1964 laid open the divisions between the South and national Democrats and elicited distinctly different voter behavior in the two regions. The agitation for civil rights by southern blacks continued white violence toward the civil rights movement, and President Lyndon Johnson's aggressive leadership all facilitated passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. ... In the South, 1964 should be associated with GOP growth while in the Northeast this election contributed to the eradication of Republicans.
Events surrounding the presidential election of 1964 marked a watershed in terms of the parties and the South (Pomper, 1972). The Solid South was built around the identification of the Democratic party with the cause of white supremacy. Events before 1964 gave white southerners pause about the linkage between the Democratic Party and white supremacy, but the 1964 election, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 altered in the minds of most the positions of the national parties on racial issues.
By 2000, however, the New Deal party alignment no longer captured patterns of partisan voting. In the intervening 40 years, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had triggered an increasingly race-driven distinction between the parties. ... Goldwater won the electoral votes of five states of the Deep South in 1964, four of them states that had voted Democratic for 84 years (Califano 1991, 55). He forged a new identification of the Republican party with racial conservatism, reversing a century-long association of the GOP with racial liberalism. This in turn opened the door for Nixon's "Southern strategy" and the Reagan victories of the eighties.
1964 was the last presidential election in which the Democrats earned more than 50 percent of the white vote in the United States.
Today, the Democratic Party is a party of professionals, minorities and the New Economy.
The American Democratic Party, typically labelled as a centre party (Armingeon et al., 2018), contributes to the incidence of this group of parties.
In addition to being even more individualistic than Canada (Hofstede Insights, 2021), the U.S. is also generally regarded as more conservative than Canada, with the U.S. Republican Party being slightly more conservative than the major conservative parties in Canada (the Conservative Party and the Bloc Quebeqois), the U.S. Democratic Party being slightly to the right of the largest Canadian party, the center-left Liberal Party, and more left-leaning Canadian parties such as the New Democratic Party receiving far more votes and legislative representation than any U.S. party on the left.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: periodical has ISBN (link)A new convention could serve as a platform that would enable progressives to go far beyond the moderation of the centrist Democratic Party to disseminate political ideas that otherwise...
In 1981 Republicans took control of the Senate for the first time since 1953, but most Southern elected officials remained white Democrats. When Republicans took control of the House in 1995, white Democrats still comprised one-third of the South's tally. ... white Southern Democrats have met their Appomattox: they will account for just 24 of the South's 155 senators and congressmen in the 112th United States Congress.
From 1952 to 2000, a majority of white voters with college degrees self-identified as Republicans. Starting with the 2012 election, this affiliation began to weaken. It loosened even more once [Donald] Trump became the Republican standard-bearer in 2016. By 2020, the college-educated called themselves Democrats by a 2:1 margin. And there were many more of them; their share of the electorate rose from 8% in 1952 to 40% in 2020. Had the party held on to the rest of its support, this would have ensured an enduring majority. Yet at the same time, Democrats lost support among whites without college degrees. They now favour Republicans by their own margin of 2:1.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: periodical has ISBN (link)The Governor of the US State of California, Gavin Newsom of the centre-left Democratic Party, has circulated draft legislation among the State's lawmakers that would extend the life of California's one-and-only nuclear power plant (NPP), Diablo Canyon.
The Progressive Old Guard: Solidly center-left on both economic and identity issues, but very concerned about the "electability" of candidates and the appeal of ideas to the political center; generally rose to prominence before Obama was elected president. Prominent examples: Joe Biden, Cuomo, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer.
First, it's clear from the exit polls that for white voters, every bit of extra education meant less support for Trump. ... Second, education matters a lot even when separating income levels. ... Third, Trump saw little difference in his support between income levels within each education group.
This all raises questions about Democrats' messaging about the economy, or maybe suggests that the type of people they hypothesize would be helped most by their policies — such as wealth redistribution from progressive and corporate taxation and federal subsidies for companies that invest in underdeveloped areas, especially when it comes to manufacturing — are not as responsive as the party hoped to the type of so-called policy "deliverism" that the Obama and Biden administrations pursued. In a more dire framing for Democrats: If a party that tells itself it stands for working-class voters is systematically losing support with those people, something has gone terribly wrong for them.
In the two decades that followed the Cold War's end, globalism gained ground over nationalism. Simultaneously, the rise of increasingly complex systems and networks—institutional, financial, and technological—overshadowed the role of the individual in politics. But in the early 2010s, a profound shift began. By learning to harness the tools of this century, a cadre of charismatic figures revived the archetypes of the previous one: the strong leader, the great nation, the proud civilization. ... They are self-styled strongmen who place little stock in rules-based systems, alliances, or multinational forums. They embrace the once and future glory of the countries they govern, asserting an almost mystical mandate for their rule. Although their programs can involve radical change, their political strategies rely on strains of conservatism, appealing over the heads of liberal, urban, cosmopolitan elites to constituencies animated by a hunger for tradition and a desire for belonging.
55% want immigration levels reduced, highest since 2001
Democrats (87%) and Independents (79%) remain more likely to view international trade as beneficial to the United States than are Republicans (68%). Notably, views of trade as a benefit for the country are up among all partisan groups compared to eight years ago (by 16 points for Democrats, 27 points for Independents, and 22 points for Republicans). In relative terms, trade skepticism is far more prevalent among Republicans than Democrats, though it is low overall. Whereas 16 percent of Americans overall think the benefits of trade accrue mostly to other countries, close to three in 10 Republicans (28%) hold this view, echoing Trump's oft-repeated gripe that the United States is being "ripped off" by its trading partners worldwide, regardless of whether they are US allies. By contrast, only 8 percent of Democrats feel the same way.
In the US the major parties are the centre-left Democrats and the right-wing Republicans.
When the Republican party nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater—one of the few senators who had opposed the Civil Rights Act—as their presidential candidate in 1964, the party attracted many southern whites but permanently alienated African-American voters. Beginning with the Goldwater-versus-Johnson campaign more southern whites voted Republican than Democratic, a pattern that has recurred in every subsequent presidential election. ... Before the 1964 presidential election the Republican party had not carried any Deep South state for eighty-eight years. Yet shortly after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, hundreds of Deep South counties gave Barry Goldwater landslide majorities.
Events surrounding the presidential election of 1964 marked a watershed in terms of the parties and the South (Pomper, 1972). The Solid South was built around the identification of the Democratic party with the cause of white supremacy. Events before 1964 gave white southerners pause about the linkage between the Democratic Party and white supremacy, but the 1964 election, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 altered in the minds of most the positions of the national parties on racial issues.
Despite this deep precarity no multitude formed to press for reforms that might offer more security. Instead, the center left democratic party now in control of the legislative and executive branches can't marshal enough support from within their own ranks to pass a multiyear phased-in federal minimum wage of $15 an hour or guarantee healthcare to all citizens.
Even though President Biden looks forward to working with Netanyahu's government, the White House has previously dodged questions over Netanyahu's right-wing politics, which are very different from the Biden administration's Center-Left Democratic Party.
Similarly, 65% of white mainline/nonevangelical Protestants said abortion should be legal in all or most cases, down from 69% in 2024.
In a multiparty system, the U.S. would almost certainly have a true left-wing party and a center-right one, in addition to today's center-left Democratic Party and the MAGA-dominated, hard-right GOP.
In sum: What was in the late Bush period a center-left Democratic Party with an awakening progressive faction has gradually become a forthrightly progressive brand.
Today, the Democratic Party is a party of professionals, minorities and the New Economy.
Proponents also say democratic socialism goes further than 'social democracy,' which often involves a strong welfare state operating under capitalism.
The Democrats fall closer to mainstream left and center-left parties in other countries, like the Social Democratic Party in Germany and Britain's Labour Party, according to their manifestos' scores.
Mr. Strauss brought the gavel down at 8:15, a quarter of an hour late, and Peter Duchin's orchestra, stationed high above the red, white and blue dais, heralded the first session with Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man."
The Democrats fall closer to mainstream left and center-left parties in other countries, like the Social Democratic Party in Germany and Britain's Labour Party, according to their manifestos' scores.
President Obama's landslide victory in 2008 was supposed to herald the beginning of a new Democratic era. And yet, six years later, there is not even a clear Democratic majority in the country, let alone one poised for 30 years of dominance. It's not because Mr. Obama's so-called new coalition of young and nonwhite voters failed to live up to its potential. They again turned out in record numbers in 2012. The Democratic majority has failed to materialize because the Republicans made large, countervailing and unappreciated gains of their own among white Southerners.
President Trump's approach to tariffs has unsettled many corporate leaders who believed he would use the levies as a negotiating tool. As it turns out, he sees them as an end in themselves.
The dilemma is reflective of the Democratic Party's broader struggles with identity politics as it dissects its losses in 2024. Recovering its standing with voters, many in the party believe, requires coming to terms with the party's transformation during the Obama and first Trump presidencies, when American liberals broadly embraced what had previously been vanguard positions on a range of social and cultural issues, including gender and race, immigration and policing.
Donald Trump's populist pitch bumped Democrats off their traditional place in American politics. ... It has long been clear that the rise of Donald J. Trump meant the end of the Republican Party as we once knew it. It has belatedly become clear that his rise may have meant the end of the Democratic Party as we knew it as well. After three Trump elections, almost every traditional Democratic constituency has swung to the right. In fact, Mr. Trump has made larger gains among Black, Hispanic, Asian American, and young voters in his three campaigns since 2016 than he has among white voters without a college degree, according to New York Times estimates. In each case, Mr. Trump fared better than any Republican in decades. ... The overarching pattern is clear. In election after election, Democrats underperformed among traditional Democratic constituencies during the Trump era. Sometimes, it was merely a failure to capitalize on his unpopularity. Other times, it was a staggering decline in support. Together, it has shattered Democratic dreams of building a new majority with the rise of a new generation of young and nonwhite voters. This overarching pattern requires an overarching explanation: Mr. Trump's populist conservatism corroded the foundations of the Democratic Party's appeal. It tapped into many of the issues and themes that once made these voters Democrats.
In the United States, the policies that self-described democratic socialists advocate for generally do not involve the complete abolition of capitalism, but rather working within the system to enact left-wing priorities, such as raising the minimum wage. That makes them closer to social democrats — a common ideology in Europe that emphasizes strong social safety nets and government involvement in areas like health care — than traditional democratic socialists, who tend to see less room for compromise around capitalism.
The most sweeping account of how neoliberalism came to dominate American politics for nearly a half century before crashing against the forces of Trumpism on the right and a new progressivism on the left. ... As he shows, the neoliberal order that emerged in America in the 1970s fused ideas of deregulation with personal freedoms, open borders with cosmopolitanism, and globalization with the promise of increased prosperity for all.
Views of U.S. free trade agreements are more positive among Democratic and Democratic-leaning respondents (60% good thing vs. 30% bad thing) than Republican and Republican-leaners (40% good thing vs. 52% bad thing). By a 58% to 31% margin, more Clinton supporters among registered Democrats say free trade agreements have been a good thing than a bad thing for the U.S. Views among Democratic backers of Sanders are similar (55% good thing vs. 38% bad thing).
Interestingly, free trade currently has much stronger support among Democrats. On issue after issue, Republicans now favor less engagement in world affairs than Democrats do — which is a sharp shift from the Reagan era.
The statistic that best defines our politics over the past 20 years is this: Nine of the past ten national elections have resulted in a change in power in at least one chamber of Congress or the White House. (The sole outlier is 2012.) Several of those elections were considered at the time to be realignments that would lead to a sustained majority for one of the major parties. ... After Republicans defeated John Kerry in 2004 and snatched five Senate seats across the South, commentators believed social issues like gay marriage would set an unwinnable trap for Democrats. Hugh Hewitt wrote a book called Painting the Map Red, imagining a permanent conservative majority. Democrats then took the House and Senate in the 2006 midterms. When Barack Obama crushed John McCain in post–financial crisis 2008, Democratic pundits decided they had an enduring majority. The Tea Party thrashed them in 2010. The conventional wisdom was that Obama was toast; he won in 2012. Donald Trump's 2016 victory signaled a changed electorate, until Democrats won the House in 2018 and the presidency in 2020, only to lose both in 2022 and 2024.
Even more starkly, researchers have shown that relying only on descriptive representation may in fact lead to lower substantive representation of minority groups by reducing the overall number of centre-left Democratic party members who substantively represent ethnic and racial minorities interests in Congress (Cameron et al., 1996;Epstein & O'Halloran, 1999).
Ocasio-Cortez [...] has since become the face of the 'Squad', freshman Democrats aiming to move the party farther left on issues such as healthcare and climate change.
Events surrounding the presidential election of 1964 marked a watershed in terms of the parties and the South (Pomper, 1972). The Solid South was built around the identification of the Democratic party with the cause of white supremacy. Events before 1964 gave white southerners pause about the linkage between the Democratic Party and white supremacy, but the 1964 election, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 altered in the minds of most the positions of the national parties on racial issues.
By 2000, however, the New Deal party alignment no longer captured patterns of partisan voting. In the intervening 40 years, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had triggered an increasingly race-driven distinction between the parties. ... Goldwater won the electoral votes of five states of the Deep South in 1964, four of them states that had voted Democratic for 84 years (Califano 1991, 55). He forged a new identification of the Republican party with racial conservatism, reversing a century-long association of the GOP with racial liberalism. This in turn opened the door for Nixon's "Southern strategy" and the Reagan victories of the eighties.
1964 was the last presidential election in which the Democrats earned more than 50 percent of the white vote in the United States.
Today, the Democratic Party is a party of professionals, minorities and the New Economy.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: periodical has ISBN (link)The Democratic Party styles itself a fighter for the working class. But a substantial part of that class-the white part-wants nothing to do with it. If we count the white working class as whites without college degrees, then congressional Democrats lost them by 30 points in last week's elections, contributing to losses in states as diverse as Iowa, Maine, Colorado, North Carolina, and Florida.
Before proceeding, it is worth pointing out that educational attainment, while highly informative, is by no means definitive. ... College-educated whites in states like Alabama and Mississippi are staunchly Republican due to a combination of racial polarization and high rates of religiosity.
The Democratic party that has long been the standard bearer for centrism in American politics, and consistent with that centrism standing on a neoliberal-neoconservative platform, perceived little threat to her and her party's bid for the White House from a Republican candidate appealing to widespread frustration with globalization, free trade, deindustrialization and the century's foreign wars.
An additional analysis shows that cities with greater attention to the sustainability-equity nexus tend to lean toward the center-left Democratic Party, to have higher education and income, and to have sustainability offices.
This was not merely a geographic shift, trading one region for another, but a more fundamental transformation of the anti-abortion movement's political ideology. In 1973 many of the most vocal opponents of abortion were northern Democrats who believed in an expanded social-welfare state and who wanted to reduce abortion rates through prenatal insurance and federally funded day care. In 2022, most anti-abortion politicians are conservative Republicans who are skeptical of such measures. What happened was a seismic religious and political shift in opposition to abortion that has not occurred in any other Western country.
Source: Guardian/Vice/CCN/YouGov poll. Note: ±4% margin of error.
Berman argues that "liberal technocrats"—professionally trained public servants who identified with a centrist Democratic Party—brought postwar neoclassical economics' obsession with efficiency into government.
While these dynamics have remained have remained important to the Democratic Party's electoral strategy since the 1990s, the finance-driven coalition described above remains high controverisal [sic] and unstable, reflecting the fact that core intellectual and ideological tensions in the platform of the U.S. center-left persist.
Consider that when Obama last ran, the Midwest was still known as an impenetrable Blue Wall, while Florida and Ohio were still purple states. When Bill Clinton gave his acceptance speech in 1996, the Democrats were competitive throughout large swathes of the South. During that period, they had gone on to win not just Clinton's Arkansas and Al Gore's Tennessee, but states such as Kentucky and Louisiana too. The story of the last three decades has been one of political success for Democrats, who have won the popular vote in seven out of the last nine elections. Yet it is also one of narrowing political constituencies and pyrrhic victories, as the party attracted college-educated professionals at the expense of the non-college-educated majority. In particular, non-college-educated whites were lost, but in recent years they have increasingly been joined by significant numbers of non-college-educated minorities.
The version of neoliberalism embedded in these policies understood a distinct role for government to stimulate market-oriented solutions to address social ills such as unemployment and poverty. It thereby aimed not to eradicate the welfare state but rather to reformulate it. It extended the importance of poverty alleviation, which had long served as a benchmark of liberal policy, and had many similarities with the basic ideas of the war on poverty.
Still, as Democrats debate whether to follow Bernie Sanders's advice and move to the left on economics with the goal of winning back working-class white voters, it is surely at least worth noting that the two Senate candidates most identified with that strategy who ran this year did worse than Hillary Clinton despite her much-discussed weaknesses, and the two Senate candidates who tried hardest to frame themselves as moderates did better than her in their respective states.
Even more to the point, once the ancient white Democratic voting habits were broken, there was really no going back. Blue Dogs were a fading echo of the Yellow Dog tradition in the South, in which the Democratic Party was the default vehicle for day-to-day political life, and the dominant presence, regardless of ideology, for state and local politics. ... So Martin's right: the Blue Dog model is gone for good. But I would warn against the very popular assumption that Democrats can simply intone "economic populism" and regain traction among "the economically pressed white voter" of the Deep South. All the reasons Democrats are struggling with non-college-educated white voters nationally are especially strong in the South: racial and religious fears, anti-urbanism, militarism, and mistrust of unions as well as Wall Street. And for a whole host of reasons, including exceptionally weak union affiliation levels and a neo-colonial heritage as a region starved for capital, the Deep South is going to be more "pro-business" than most of the country.
Four years ago, they were the most influential voting bloc on Capitol Hill, more than 50 House Democrats pulling their liberal colleagues to a more centrist, fiscally conservative vision on issues such as health care and Wall Street reforms.
Modern liberalism occupies the left-of-center in the traditional political spectrum and is represented by the Democratic Party in the United States.
[...] a widening rift between the party's centrist establishment and a progressive wing [...]
The Progressive Old Guard: Solidly center-left on both economic and identity issues, but very concerned about the "electability" of candidates and the appeal of ideas to the political center; generally rose to prominence before Obama was elected president. Prominent examples: Joe Biden, Cuomo, Dianne Feinstein, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer.
Including the American Democratic Party in a comparative analysis of center-left parties is unorthodox, since unlike Europe, America has not produced a socialist movement tied to a strong union movement. Yet the Democrats may have become center-left before anyone else, obliged by their different historical trajectory to build complex alliances with social groups other than the working class and to deal with unusually powerful capitalists ... Taken together, the three chapters devoted to the United States show that the center-left in America faces much the same set of problems as elsewhere and, especially in light of the election results from 2008, that the Democratic Party's potential to win elections, despite its current slide in approval, may be at least equal to that of any center-left party in Europe ... Despite the setback in the 2010 midterms, together the foregoing trends have put the Democrats in a position to eventually build a dominant center-left majority in the United States.
By the 1840s, Whig and Democratic congressmen voted as rival blocs. Whigs supported and Democrats opposed a weak executive, a new Bank of the United States, a high tariff, distribution of land revenues to the states, relief legislation to mitigate the effects of the depression, and federal reapportionment of House seats. Whigs voted against and Democrats approved an independent treasury, an aggressive foreign policy, and expansionism. These were important issues, capable of dividing the electorate just as they divided the major parties in Congress.
When the Republican party nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater—one of the few senators who had opposed the Civil Rights Act—as their presidential candidate in 1964, the party attracted many southern whites but permanently alienated African-American voters. Beginning with the Goldwater-versus-Johnson campaign more southern whites voted Republican than Democratic, a pattern that has recurred in every subsequent presidential election. ... Before the 1964 presidential election the Republican party had not carried any Deep South state for eighty-eight years. Yet shortly after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, hundreds of Deep South counties gave Barry Goldwater landslide majorities.
The version of neoliberalism embedded in these policies understood a distinct role for government to stimulate market-oriented solutions to address social ills such as unemployment and poverty. It thereby aimed not to eradicate the welfare state but rather to reformulate it. It extended the importance of poverty alleviation, which had long served as a benchmark of liberal policy, and had many similarities with the basic ideas of the war on poverty.
The statistic that best defines our politics over the past 20 years is this: Nine of the past ten national elections have resulted in a change in power in at least one chamber of Congress or the White House. (The sole outlier is 2012.) Several of those elections were considered at the time to be realignments that would lead to a sustained majority for one of the major parties. ... After Republicans defeated John Kerry in 2004 and snatched five Senate seats across the South, commentators believed social issues like gay marriage would set an unwinnable trap for Democrats. Hugh Hewitt wrote a book called Painting the Map Red, imagining a permanent conservative majority. Democrats then took the House and Senate in the 2006 midterms. When Barack Obama crushed John McCain in post–financial crisis 2008, Democratic pundits decided they had an enduring majority. The Tea Party thrashed them in 2010. The conventional wisdom was that Obama was toast; he won in 2012. Donald Trump's 2016 victory signaled a changed electorate, until Democrats won the House in 2018 and the presidency in 2020, only to lose both in 2022 and 2024.
Weak economic growth and record immigration are driving gains by the right, especially populists.
The Democrats fall closer to mainstream left and center-left parties in other countries, like the Social Democratic Party in Germany and Britain's Labour Party, according to their manifestos' scores.
First, it's clear from the exit polls that for white voters, every bit of extra education meant less support for Trump. ... Second, education matters a lot even when separating income levels. ... Third, Trump saw little difference in his support between income levels within each education group.
The data in Table 3 show that ideology had a powerful influence on vote choice in the 2020 presidential election. Almost all white voters located to the left of center on the ideology scale, regardless of education, voted for Biden, while almost all white voters located to the right of center, regardless of education, voted for Trump. Those in the center, just over one-fifth of white voters, favored Biden overall by a margin of 57% to 43%. However, there is little evidence that economic insecurity had any impact on the candidate preferences of even this group. Finally, it is worth noting that after controlling for ideology, there is almost no remaining difference between the candidate preferences of college and non-college whites. The class divide in candidate preference among white voters in 2020 is almost entirely explained by the fact that non-college white voters are now far more conservative across the board than are white college graduates.
President Obama's landslide victory in 2008 was supposed to herald the beginning of a new Democratic era. And yet, six years later, there is not even a clear Democratic majority in the country, let alone one poised for 30 years of dominance. It's not because Mr. Obama's so-called new coalition of young and nonwhite voters failed to live up to its potential. They again turned out in record numbers in 2012. The Democratic majority has failed to materialize because the Republicans made large, countervailing and unappreciated gains of their own among white Southerners.
Before proceeding, it is worth pointing out that educational attainment, while highly informative, is by no means definitive. ... College-educated whites in states like Alabama and Mississippi are staunchly Republican due to a combination of racial polarization and high rates of religiosity.
Source: Guardian/Vice/CCN/YouGov poll. Note: ±4% margin of error.
{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: periodical has ISBN (link)President Trump's approach to tariffs has unsettled many corporate leaders who believed he would use the levies as a negotiating tool. As it turns out, he sees them as an end in themselves.
This was not merely a geographic shift, trading one region for another, but a more fundamental transformation of the anti-abortion movement's political ideology. In 1973 many of the most vocal opponents of abortion were northern Democrats who believed in an expanded social-welfare state and who wanted to reduce abortion rates through prenatal insurance and federally funded day care. In 2022, most anti-abortion politicians are conservative Republicans who are skeptical of such measures. What happened was a seismic religious and political shift in opposition to abortion that has not occurred in any other Western country.
55% want immigration levels reduced, highest since 2001
In the two decades that followed the Cold War's end, globalism gained ground over nationalism. Simultaneously, the rise of increasingly complex systems and networks—institutional, financial, and technological—overshadowed the role of the individual in politics. But in the early 2010s, a profound shift began. By learning to harness the tools of this century, a cadre of charismatic figures revived the archetypes of the previous one: the strong leader, the great nation, the proud civilization. ... They are self-styled strongmen who place little stock in rules-based systems, alliances, or multinational forums. They embrace the once and future glory of the countries they govern, asserting an almost mystical mandate for their rule. Although their programs can involve radical change, their political strategies rely on strains of conservatism, appealing over the heads of liberal, urban, cosmopolitan elites to constituencies animated by a hunger for tradition and a desire for belonging.
Four years ago, they were the most influential voting bloc on Capitol Hill, more than 50 House Democrats pulling their liberal colleagues to a more centrist, fiscally conservative vision on issues such as health care and Wall Street reforms.
This all raises questions about Democrats' messaging about the economy, or maybe suggests that the type of people they hypothesize would be helped most by their policies — such as wealth redistribution from progressive and corporate taxation and federal subsidies for companies that invest in underdeveloped areas, especially when it comes to manufacturing — are not as responsive as the party hoped to the type of so-called policy "deliverism" that the Obama and Biden administrations pursued. In a more dire framing for Democrats: If a party that tells itself it stands for working-class voters is systematically losing support with those people, something has gone terribly wrong for them.
Democrats have become the home of highly-educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees who increasingly distrust teachers, scientists, journalists, universities, non-profit organizations, and even corporations.
The most sweeping account of how neoliberalism came to dominate American politics for nearly a half century before crashing against the forces of Trumpism on the right and a new progressivism on the left. ... As he shows, the neoliberal order that emerged in America in the 1970s fused ideas of deregulation with personal freedoms, open borders with cosmopolitanism, and globalization with the promise of increased prosperity for all.
Ocasio-Cortez [...] has since become the face of the 'Squad', freshman Democrats aiming to move the party farther left on issues such as healthcare and climate change.
What are we to make of American parties at the dawn of the twenty-first century? ... The impact of the 1960s civil rights revolution has been to create two more ideologically coherent parties: a generally liberal or center-left party and a conservative party.
We conclude by considering why Democrats have taken this course, why they are not perceived as having done so, and why, at this fraught juncture for American democratic capitalism, political scientists could learn much from closer examination of the rich world's largest center-left party.
The events of 1964 laid open the divisions between the South and national Democrats and elicited distinctly different voter behavior in the two regions. The agitation for civil rights by southern blacks continued white violence toward the civil rights movement, and President Lyndon Johnson's aggressive leadership all facilitated passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. ... In the South, 1964 should be associated with GOP growth while in the Northeast this election contributed to the eradication of Republicans.
Events surrounding the presidential election of 1964 marked a watershed in terms of the parties and the South (Pomper, 1972). The Solid South was built around the identification of the Democratic party with the cause of white supremacy. Events before 1964 gave white southerners pause about the linkage between the Democratic Party and white supremacy, but the 1964 election, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 altered in the minds of most the positions of the national parties on racial issues.
By 2000, however, the New Deal party alignment no longer captured patterns of partisan voting. In the intervening 40 years, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had triggered an increasingly race-driven distinction between the parties. ... Goldwater won the electoral votes of five states of the Deep South in 1964, four of them states that had voted Democratic for 84 years (Califano 1991, 55). He forged a new identification of the Republican party with racial conservatism, reversing a century-long association of the GOP with racial liberalism. This in turn opened the door for Nixon's "Southern strategy" and the Reagan victories of the eighties.
1964 was the last presidential election in which the Democrats earned more than 50 percent of the white vote in the United States.
Mr. Strauss brought the gavel down at 8:15, a quarter of an hour late, and Peter Duchin's orchestra, stationed high above the red, white and blue dais, heralded the first session with Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man."
The dilemma is reflective of the Democratic Party's broader struggles with identity politics as it dissects its losses in 2024. Recovering its standing with voters, many in the party believe, requires coming to terms with the party's transformation during the Obama and first Trump presidencies, when American liberals broadly embraced what had previously been vanguard positions on a range of social and cultural issues, including gender and race, immigration and policing.
[...] a widening rift between the party's centrist establishment and a progressive wing [...]
Weak economic growth and record immigration are driving gains by the right, especially populists.