9.4: The Origins of America's Parties

Though the Founders designed a constitution that would inevitably give rise to parties, they were apprehensive about the prospect. 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 much of his farewell address to warn Americans of “the common and continual mischiefs of the spirit of party.”

Notwithstanding these warnings, parties began forming almost immediately after the Constitution was ratified. Supporters of strong central government and urban interests like banking and manufacturing styled themselves the Federalist Party. 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 19th century, the major conflicts in American politics were between different factions of the Democratic-Republican 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.

The Democratic Party (which began as one of these factions) became dominant in 1828 with the election of President Andrew Jackson. Breaking with the tradition of elite-centric parties in the United States and elsewhere, it was the first to embody the party structure we are familiar with today. Jackson built 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 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, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency and established the Republicans as a major party. Lincoln’s Republicans opposed slavery and supported civil liberties and economic modernization.

Since their emergence, both the Democratic and Republican parties have evolved considerably. Each has abandoned its positions on certain issues and adopted new ones. Each has also been supported by different demographic groups at different points, 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 2024 presidential election.)

Figure 9.2: Presidential vote by demographic group, 2024 (Source: Pew Research Center)