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Democratic Party,in the United States, one of the two major political parties, the other being the Republican Party.

The Democratic Party has changed significantly during its more than two centuries of existence. During the 19th century the party supported or tolerated slavery, and it opposed civil rights reforms after the Civil War in order to retain the support of Southern voters. By the mid-20th century it had undergone a dramatic ideological realignment and reinvented itself as a party supporting organized labour, the civil rights of minorities, and progressive reform. Since President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal of the 1930s, the party has also tended to favour greater government intervention in the economy and to oppose government intervention in the private, noneconomic affairs of citizens. The logo of the Democratic Party, the donkey, was popularized by cartoonist Thomas Nast in the 1870s; though widely used, it has never been officially adopted by the party.

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 antimonarchical 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 1836, 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).

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