9.3: The Origins of America's Parties

Though the Founders designed a constitution that would inevitably give rise to parties, they were nonetheless apprehensive about parties and their potential effects on government. Benjamin Franklin feared “the infinite mutual Abuse of Parties” would “[tear] to Pieces the best of Characters.” Thomas Jefferson declared, “If I could not go to heaven but with a party, I would not go there at all.” Most famously, George Washington dedicated a large portion of his farewell address to cautioning Americans against “the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party.”

The donkey and the elephant — illustrated here in two political cartoons from the 1870s by Thomas Nast — have been the unofficial mascots of the Democratic and Republican parties (respectively) for most of their existence.

Notwithstanding these warnings, parties began to take shape almost immediately after the Constitution was ratified. Supporters of strong central government and urban interests such as banking and manufacturing styled themselves the Federalist Party, while their opponents who favored decentralization and rural interests such as agriculture called themselves the Democratic-Republican Party. The Federalist Party lost power after 1800 and collapsed shortly thereafter; thus, for the first few decades of the 19^th century, the major conflicts in American politics were intraparty ones, between different factions of the Democratic-Republican Party.

The Democratic Party (which began as one of these factions) became a dominant political force in 1828 with the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency. Breaking with the tradition of elite-centric parties in the United States and elsewhere, the Democratic Party was the first to embody the party structure we are familiar with today (and remains the world’s oldest active party). Jackson was the first presidential candidate to build a national organization of loyal followers, including many average citizens, which propelled him to victory with a strong base of popular support. Jackson’s Democrats styled themselves the party of the common man, opposed national government intervention in states’ affairs, and supported slavery.

For a time, the Democrats were opposed by the Whig Party, which initially emerged as an anti-Jackson coalition. The Whigs broke up in the 1850s, largely due to their inability to agree on the issue of slavery, and were replaced by the newly-established Republican Party, founded in 1854. The first Republican presidential candidate, John C. Frémont, lost the 1856 presidential election. Four years later, the Republicans nominated Abraham Lincoln, who won the presidency in 1860 and established the Republican Party as a major party. Lincoln’s Republicans opposed slavery and supported both civil liberties and economic modernization.

Both the Democratic and Republican parties have evolved considerably since first appearing on the American political scene. Over time, each has abandoned its positions on certain issues and adopted new ones. Each has also been supported by different demographic groups at different points in history, with periodic realignments during which certain groups shift their support from one party to another. These changes reinforce one another: parties adjust their positions to recruit blocs of voters to their side, and those same blocs gain power and influence over parties as those parties become increasingly reliant upon them for votes. (Some of these blocs are visible in Figure 9.2 below, which displays a demographic breakdown of voting in the 2020 presidential election.)

Figure 9.2: Presidential vote by demographic group, 2020 (Source: Pew Research Center)