Revolution Agains the Dnc and Gop

23 maps that explain how Democrats went from the party of racism to the political party of Obama

By Updated Jul 29, 2016, 1:08pm EDT

The Democratic Political party is the longest-existing political political party in the Usa, and arguably the world. But in its over 180 year existence, it's completed a remarkable ideological and geographic transformation. Originally a staunch defender of Southern slavery, the political party now wins the back up of most nonwhite voters. Once an abet of rural interests against littoral elites, the party now draws much of its strength from cities and coastal areas. These maps tell the tale of the Autonomous Party's origins, its various metamorphoses, and the sources of its strength — and weaknesses — today.

Origins

1) Democrats: The party of Andrew Jackson

For 28 years afterward Thomas Jefferson was elected president in 1800, his party, accounted Autonomous-Republicans by today'south political scientists but commonly referred to equally Republicans and then, controlled the presidency and dominated US politics. Simply by the mid-1820s, that party had begun to fracture. Factions formed around politicians from unlike regions with competing ambitions — 1 of whom was Andrew Jackson, who had gained national fame as a full general during the War of 1812. In his 1824 presidential bid, Jackson won pluralities of both the popular vote and electoral college. But since no candidate won an outright majority, the election went to the House of Representatives, which chose John Quincy Adams equally president. Jackson speedily became the leading opposition figure to Adams' presidency, and in their 1828 rematch, the results of which are shown here, he won broad support everywhere outside the Northeast, and swept into office. At the time, his supporters didn't have an official name, and were unremarkably called "Jackson men." But because they argued that they had the popular will, they distinguished themselves from their rivals by calling themselves "Autonomous" Republicans — and eventually, merely "Democrats."

2) Democrats: The party of Indian removal

Ane major issue animated Jackson's presidency from his very first yr: the forced removal of Indians living east of the Mississippi River, to articulate the way for more than white settlement. This map shows the removal of the "V Civilized Tribes" — Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole — that ensued after Jackson signed the Indian Removal Human action into law in 1830. Indians were rounded up from their homes, and sent to concentration camps and on forced marches. About 46,000 people were expelled during Jackson's presidency. The outcome was ane of the nearly of import in defining the new Autonomous Political party — according to historian Daniel Walker Howe, an assay of Congressional votes at the fourth dimension found that "voting on Indian affairs proved to exist the nearly consistent predictor of partisan affiliation."

3) Democrats: The party of Manifest Destiny

With the Indians moved out, the Democratic Party turned its sights westward. By the 1840s, the party had embraced the idea of "manifest destiny" — that (white) Americans were divinely entitled to domination of the whole North American continent. In his volume The Battle Cry of Liberty, historian James McPherson calls Manifest Destiny "mainly a Democratic doctrine," and writes that the political party "pressed for the expansion of American institutions beyond the whole of North America, whether the residents — Indians, Spaniards, Mexicans, Canadians — wanted them or not." This map shows all 19th century westward expansion in the contiguous US, but pay close attending to the westernmost regions. Iii massive expansions — the annexation of Texas, the Oregon acquisition, and the postwar Mexican Cession — occurred during the presidency of Democrat James K. Polk. The Mexican-American War in particular, pushed by Polk and criticized by the opposition Whigs, expanded US holdings all the manner to California — and set the stage for controversy over whether slavery should be expanded to these newly-acquired territories.

The Civil War and its aftermath

four) Democrats were the party of slavery

As the 1850s began, the question over whether slavery should be allowed in new territories and states became the major dividing line in American politics — and the Democratic Party more than and more clearly became the nearly important institutional supporter of slavery. Their principal rivals, the Whigs, were split on the issue regionally, merely fifty-fifty most Democrats exterior the South were expected to refrain from criticizing the so-chosen "peculiar establishment." Furthermore, Democratic conventions had a rule requiring two-thirds approval for any presidential nominee, which effectively gave the Due south veto power over the choice. In 1854, the Kansas-Nebraska Act — passed nether Democratic President Franklin Pierce, by a Democrat-controlled Congress — set the phase for even stronger sectionalism in U.s. politics, over slavery. Most notably, the new law outright repealed the decades-onetime ban on slavery north of the 36°30′ line, instead assuasive residents of the Kansas and Nebraska territories to vote on whether to permit slavery by popular sovereignty. The law and ensuing encarmine disharmonize in Kansas provoked a tremendous backlash in the N, and was the death knell for the regionally divided Whig Political party. An irrevocable split between Northern and Southern Whigs immune for the rise of a new Northern party organized around opposition to expanding slavery — the Republicans.

v) The Democratic Party fractured during the Civil War

Crisis finally arrived with the 1860 election of Republican Abraham Lincoln equally president, the subsequent secession of xi Southern states, and the breakout of the Civil State of war. The new Confederacy was suspicious of party organizations, so though quondam Democrats like Jefferson Davis played major roles in the new regime, the Democratic Party no longer operated in the South during the state of war. In the Union, still, the party remained Lincoln's master opposition. There was a range of opinion, including moderate Peace Democrats who preferred a negotiated settlement, Copperheads who wanted to end the war immediately and blamed abolitionists for provoking information technology, and State of war Democrats who wanted peace through victory. In 1864, Republicans pushed a constitutional amendment to abolish slavery, which went downwards to defeat in the House in June considering 57 of the sleeping accommodation's 72 Democrats opposed it, as shown on this map. Every bit Lincoln ran for reelection that year with the back up of some War Democrats, the Peace Democrats fought dorsum with what historian William Lee Miller called "the most explicitly and virulently racist campaign by a major party in American history." Democrats constantly stoked fears that Lincoln's policies would lead to miscegenation and racial equality. The party had performed well in the 1862 midterms, and every bit late as Baronial 1864 Lincoln expected to lose. But the fall of Atlanta in early September restored public confidence in Lincoln's handling of the war. He swept to a landslide victory that November, and passage and ratification of the 13th Subpoena presently followed.

half dozen) The Democratic domination of the South

After the Civil State of war, information technology was clear that the Republican Party was the nation's governing party. In the side by side 11 presidential elections, spanning 1868 to 1908, Democrats only managed to win twice (Grover Cleveland's ii nonconsecutive terms). They held the Senate for simply four years in that 40-twelvemonth timespan, and the Business firm of Representatives for 16. In the South, withal, the Democrats became finer the only political party — a situation that would last for decades, since the Republican Party was then closely associated with Lincoln, the war, and the end of slavery. This map shows how the Southward overwhelmingly voted for Democrats in presidential elections. But the say-so existed at state and local regime levels likewise, leading to abiding abuses of the rights of freed blacks. "Long into the twentieth century, the Due south remained a one-party region nether the control of a reactionary ruling aristocracy who used the aforementioned violence and fraud that had helped defeat Reconstruction to stifle internal dissent," wrote historian Eric Foner in his book Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution.

7) The party of farmers and silverish

Afterwards Reconstruction, racial problems receded from the national debate — and instead, monetary policy became the hot-push button outcome of the tardily 19th century. The 1873 adoption of the gold standard and catastrophe of argent coinage was incredibly controversial amid farmers, who blamed the policy modify and the business organization interests who supported information technology for various economical hardships. As a issue, farmers across the South and Due west began to gravitate toward the Democrats. Matters came to a head in the election of 1896, when Autonomous nominee William Jennings Bryan attempted to mobilize a national populist coalition against aureate-supporting capitalists, saying his opponents "shall not crucify mankind upon a cantankerous of gold." But he failed — the rural states that backed him weren't enough for a majority, considering more populous states in the Northeast and Great Lakes voted Republican. "McKinley's triumph indicated that the Republicans had secured control of America'south industrial base," wrote historian HW Brands in his volume American Colossus. "Urban workers crossed class lines to vote with their employers rather than with the farmers of the South and Westward." They would keep doing so — letting the Republican Party dominate national politics — for decades.

Embracing authorities activism

8) Woodrow Wilson and Progressivism

The Progressive political tradition arose in the U.s.a. equally the 19th century slipped into the 20th. Information technology focused on fighting abuse, countering the power of monopolistic trusts, social reform, and the active use of government to try to improve people'due south lives. Originally, there were progressive elements in both parties (and outside them), with Republican Theodore Roosevelt and Democrat Woodrow Wilson as leading figures. This map shows the electoral college results of the 1912 presidential election, which pitted Wilson and Roosevelt (at present heading a new Progressive Party) against each other and the incumbent Republican president, William Howard Taft. Wilson won, and Democrats enacted various economic and governmental reforms during his presidency, such as an antitrust police and an income taxation. Eventually, the Democratic Party became known every bit the main domicile for progressives.

9) The party elected to fight the Great Low

This is the map that finally restored the Democratic Party to dominance of national politics. Afterward the 1920s decade of Republican dominion, more often than not pro-business organization policies, and a booming economy, the bottom finally fell out when the Peachy Depression crushed the presidency of Herbert Hoover. The discrediting of laissez-faire ideas and the inability of Republicans to bargain with the crisis led to landslide Democratic victories in 1932, when, as this map shows, the boilerplate unemployment charge per unit among gainful workers was 34.5 per centum. Franklin D. Roosevelt swept into office and enacted the New Deal, perhaps the well-nigh sweeping domestic legislative program in American history. His assistants besides dramatically expanded the size of regime and created the modern executive country.

10) The party of government spending

The New Bargain — which became the allegorical liberal program for decades to come — included diverse attempts to boost the economy, jobs programs, laws expanding union powers, and the cosmos of Social Security. It also led to a lot of private projects, ranging from infrastructure development to arts, that put people back to work and made articulate the function government could play in American life. This map shows the sweep of New Deal projects beyond the country, from the Chickamauga Dam in Chattanooga, Tennessee to a post office in Riverton, Wyoming. Head over to the Living New Deal website for the interactive version of the map, which shows the specifics of every single projection.

11) The political party of unions

In the decade subsequently the National Labor Relations Deed passed in 1935, US wedlock membership more quadrupled, to 14.3 million workers, writes Rich Yeselson. This expansion provided a new and durable organizational base that became increasingly associated with but the Democratic Party. But unions didn't flourish everywhere — they had item problem breaking into rural areas and the South. The expansion of union influence and power produced a backlash — both among the Republican Political party and business organization interests, and in the still-Autonomous S, which was suspicious of marriage organizing. In 1947, these two elements joined together to enact the Taft-Hartley Act over President Truman'due south veto. The law "stopped labor dead in its tracks at a betoken when unions were large, growing, and confident of their economic and political power," Yeselson writes. States were now permitted to laissez passer "right to work" laws that prevented mandatory union membership among employees — and many soon did.

12) The divide over civil rights

The Democrats' coalition of the mid-20th century was divided betwixt Southerners who supported segregation, liberal activists trying to end it, and others exterior the S who were happy to look the other style. Eventually, though, the supporters of civil rights gained the upper mitt, pushing through of import civil rights and voting rights laws in the mid-1960s. This map shows states where Democratic senators voted for cloture for the Civil Rights Act of 1964, where they voted confronting it (which meant continuing the filibuster), or where the party had 2 senators whose votes were split. Nearly all Republicans voted in favor of cloture, which was invoked 71-29, but it was Autonomous president Lyndon Johnson who signed it and the subsequent Voting Rights Act into law — which helped drive more and more blackness voters to embrace the party that had so long been associated with racial discrimination.

thirteen) The (gradual) loss of the South

"I think we just delivered the Southward to the Republican Party for a long future," President Johnson said soon after signing the Civil Rights Act, according to his aide Bill Moyers. Nonetheless party loyalties take a long time to shake off, and while the South certainly appears lost to Democrats today, the interruption-up was very gradual. Democrats maintained control of the House of Representatives for an amazing forty direct years between 1955 and 1994, in large part because of continued back up from conservative Southerners, equally shown in this map by Jonathan Davis at Arizona State Academy. The Senate, as well, remained in Autonomous hands for all but 6 of those years. Bulk control didn't necessarily mean the political party could laissez passer progressive bills, though, every bit many of the Southern conservatives frequently partnered with Republicans to block liberal initiatives. The South too provided the Democrats' but ii successful presidential candidates between 1968 and 2008 — Jimmy Carter, who won most every Southern state in 1976, and Bill Clinton, who won a few.

14) The antiwar move

Democratic presidents began American involvement in World War I, World State of war Ii, the Korean State of war, and the Vietnam War. But Vietnam created a tremendous political backlash in America, every bit hundreds of thousands were drafted and tens of thousands died for a war with no end in sight. This map shows five major examples of anti-Vietnam War protests between 1967 and 1968 — the fifth of which infamously occurred at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and spiraled into violence. Since the sixties, at that place'south been a dovish tradition in the Autonomous Party — even if it isn't ever heeded. When George HW Bush took the Gulf War resolution to a vote in 1991, the bedroom was controlled past Democrats — but just 18 percent of Democratic senators, and 32 per centum of Autonomous House members, voted in favor of war. After 9/11, more than Democrats voted for George West. Bush'southward war in Republic of iraq, though many on the left remained suspicious. When that effort foundered, anger over information technology helped energize the Democrats and restore them to Congress in 2006. Senator Hillary Clinton's vote to authorize force in Republic of iraq similarly helped propel Barack Obama to the nomination, and the presidency, in 2008.

Today's Democratic coalition

15) Democrats are strong in big cities

This map of New York's political donors is from a serial past Crowdpac that plots out the address of every disclosed political donor in America, and uses blue dots to mark Democratic donors and red ones to marking Republicans. We see here that NYC is overwhelmingly blue, which makes sense — according to an analysis by Richard Florida, 11 of the 15 largest US cities voted for Obama over Romney in 2012, and Obama performed specially well in denser cities. "Flush, high-tech, creative class metros" like New York and Los Angeles are "mostly blue," while "less advantaged, less skilled metros in the Sun Belt and even in the Midwest are increasingly red," Florida writes.

sixteen) Richer Americans vote Republican, poorer ones vote Democratic

In recent years, the richest states — many of which are in the Northeast or on the W Declension — take tended to vote Democratic. But that doesn't mean that the Democrats are the party of the rich. These maps, from Andrew Gelman's book "Red Country, Blue State, Rich State, Poor State," separate how the richest third and poorest third of the population in each state voted in the 2004 presidential election (which was won by George W. Bush). Gelman's assay shows that the richest third of nearly every land's electorate voted for Bush, while the poorest 3rd of voters in most states opted for Democrat John Kerry.

17) Democrats perform desperately among evangelical Protestants

Here's another map of where Democrats are strongest today — in places where there aren't many evangelical Protestants. American politics weren't always incredibly polarized by organized religion, merely restrictions on school prayer and the expansion of abortion rights helped trigger the mobilization of the Christian right. These bug weren't purely partisan when they start came up, but gradually, Democrats and the liberal establishment became known for protecting ballgame rights, defending the separation of church and land, and (more slowly) expanding gay rights.

18) Few Blue Dog Democrats remain

After the dramatic defeat of many House Democrats in 1994, the more conservative members of the party felt they needed a group to improve coordinate them — or at least a characterization they could use to distinguish themselves from the party'southward liberals. So the "Bluish Dog Democrats" were formed. Its members tended to be more pro-business and more than socially conservative. By 2009, with the Democrats back in control of Congress for Obama's first year, the coalition had swelled to include 54 members of the Business firm, and great pressure was placed on Blue Dogs to support Obama'south calendar on health reform and cap-and-trade — which many of them did. The backlash broke the Blueish Dogs, and the vast bulk of the coalition either retired or was defeated in subsequent elections. These maps prove the decline in House districts represented by Bluish Dogs from 2009 to 2013. The Blue Dogs' ranks will shrink further after the Democrats' 2014 drubbing, to either 14 or 15 (depending on a recount).

19) The political party of unions

Labor remains a central pillar in the Democratic coalition in states where it nonetheless has a presence. Just wedlock membership has dropped so much, and unions take been so weakened, that the party now has to look elsewhere for much of its fiscal support and organizational muscle — to rich donors and social result interest groups. Individual-sector union membership has especially plummeted, from 35 per centum or and so in the 1950s to just half-dozen.9 per centum in 2011. This map shows the percent of each state's 2011 labor force that was in a matrimony — and makes it clear that Democrats perform better in more than unionized states. Measures that would weaken unions further, like correct to piece of work laws or restrictions on commonage bargaining for public employees, are cardinal pillars of the Republican agenda in many states today.

The hereafter of the political party

20) The growth of the nonwhite electorate

Since LBJ's 1964 landslide, Republicans have won more of the white vote than Democrats in every single presidential ballot. Initially, this led to the Democrats losing the presidency quite frequently. Simply as the share of the nonwhite population has grown, Democratic prospects in presidential elections have improved — and the political party has won the pop vote in 5 of the last half dozen presidential elections. "Every year, the nonwhite proportion of the electorate grows by about one-half a pct betoken—pregnant that in every presidential ballot, the minority share of the vote increases by 2 percentage, a huge amount in a closely divided state," Jonathan Chait has written. By 2020, he added, "nonwhite voters should rise from a quarter of the 2008 electorate to one third." This map, from PolicyLink, shows one project of how much The states population growth in the next 30 years will be due to people of color.

21) Democrats and the white vote

Though Barack Obama won the 2012 presidential ballot, he only picked up nigh 40 percentage of the white vote — the lowest for a Democrat in decades. Just this decline wasn't evenly distributed. The New Republic posted an fantabulous map that makes this clear with a county-level comparison of Al Gore'due south performance in 2000 to Barack Obama's performance in 2012. In the red counties, Obama did amend than Gore, and in the blue counties, he did worse. "Democrats have a problem with Southern whites, not all whites," Nate Cohn wrote, pointing out that Obama won heavily-white New Hampshire, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The party performed less well among whites in the 2014 midterms, though, and so we'll run across how things plough out in 2016.

22) Weakness in u.s.

The Obama presidency has brought some major setbacks for Democrats in united states, equally you can encounter in this map, which shows the partisan balance of country legislatures later the 2014 midterms. Democrats concluded up with full command in a mere xi state legislatures, while the GOP got full command of 30. The number of states where Democrats control both the governorship and the state legislature has been cut to 7 — the fewest since the Ceremonious War. If united states are the "laboratories of republic," as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis put information technology, it'southward the Republican Party, not the Democrats, who will be the ones conducting experiments in the adjacent few years.

23) Growth of Hispanics in key states

Hispanic population growth, 1980-2010 GIF

The growth of the Hispanic population has been particularly of import to presidential-yr Democratic math. These maps, from Pew, prove the growth of that population from 1980 to 2011. This growth already helped California and New Mexico become solidly Autonomous states on the presidential level, and helped tip swing states Florida and Colorado toward Barack Obama besides. Information technology too gives political context to President Obama'southward deportation relief executive action of Nov 2014: Democrats believe that the futurity of their party relies on the forcefulness of their bond with the Hispanic electorate.

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Credits

Developer Yuri Victor

Editor Ezra Klein

Lead Photo: Lucian / Washington Post / Getty

Update: Clarified that the term "Democratic-Republicans" is the technical term used for Jefferson'southward party past political scientists today, not at the time.

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Source: https://www.vox.com/2014/12/8/7328755/maps-democratic-party