Democratic Party (United States)
미국 민주당
A political party in the United States organised in the late 1820s around Andrew Jackson’s presidential campaigns. Together with the Republican Party it has dominated American politics since the 1850s, and it is the oldest active political party in the world. It became a liberal party after the New Deal of the 1930s and is today classed as centre to centre-left.
In depth
Party officials often trace its origins to the Democratic-Republican Party founded by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in 1792, but historians hold that the modern Democratic Party was first organised in the late 1820s with the election of Andrew Jackson. The founding date is debated: 23 December 1823, when the Greensburg Resolution was read in Pennsylvania; 8 January 1828, when Jackson launched his campaign; and the first national convention of 1832 are all cited. It was Martin Van Buren who assembled politicians in every state behind Jackson. Before 1860 the party supported expansive presidential power, the interests of slave states, agrarianism and expansionism, opposed a national bank and high tariffs, and won six of the eight presidential elections from 1828 to 1856.
In 1854 anti-slavery Democrats angered by the Kansas–Nebraska Act left the party and joined Northern Whigs in forming the Republican Party. In 1860 the Democrats split over slavery into Northern and Southern tickets, allowing the Republican Abraham Lincoln to win. After Reconstruction ended and African Americans were violently disenfranchised, the South voted so uniformly Democratic that it became known as the “Solid South”. From the nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896 the party generally stood to the left of the Republicans on economic issues, and Woodrow Wilson was elected president in 1912 and 1916.
Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected in 1932 during the Great Depression, launched the New Deal of business regulation, support for labour unions, relief for the unemployed and large public works, and built a New Deal coalition of white Southerners, Northern workers, unions, African Americans, Catholic and Jewish communities and progressives. The Democrats controlled the House of Representatives almost without interruption from 1930 to 1994. After Lyndon B. Johnson’s administration passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Great Society legislation, white Southerners shifted to the Republican Party, and the Vietnam War further fractured the party’s coalition. In 1968 Robert F. Kennedy, a candidate for the presidential nomination, was assassinated.
After losing to Ronald Reagan in 1980, the party turned with Bill Clinton’s election in 1992 towards centrism and the “Third Way”, adopting market-based economic policies. Barack Obama was elected in 2008 and passed the Affordable Care Act in 2010; Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in 2020, but Kamala Harris lost to Trump in 2024. According to the English-language source, 16 Democrats have served as president as of 2026, and by registered members it is the largest party in the United States and the third largest in the world. The Russian-language source notes that the party has no fixed membership: affiliation is determined by voting for its candidates in elections.