^A:The Oxford Companion to American Politics observes that the terms "progressive" and "liberal" are "often used interchangeably" in political discourse regarding "the center-left".[15]
The Democratic Party was founded in 1828. Martin Van Buren of New York played the central role in building the coalition of state organizations that formed a new party as a vehicle to elect Andrew Jackson of Tennessee. The Democratic Party is the world's oldest active political party. It initially supported expansive presidential power, agrarianism, and geographical expansionism, while opposing a national bank and high tariffs. It won the presidency only twice[b] between 1860 and 1912, although it won the popular vote two more times in that period. In the late 19th century, it continued to oppose high tariffs and had fierce internal debates on the gold standard. In the early 20th century, it partially (not all factions) supported progressive reforms and opposed imperialism, with Woodrow Wilson winning the White House in 1912 and 1916.
^"About the Democratic Party". Democrats. March 4, 2019. Archived from the original on April 6, 2022. Retrieved April 15, 2022. For 171 years, [the Democratic National Committee] has been responsible for governing the Democratic Party
^Democratic Party (March 12, 2022). "The Charter & The Bylaws of the Democratic Party of the United States"(PDF). p. 3. Archived(PDF) from the original on March 27, 2022. Retrieved April 15, 2022. The Democratic National Committee shall have general responsibility for the affairs of the Democratic Party between National Conventions
^Cole, Donald B. (1970). Jacksonian Democracy in New Hampshire, 1800–1851. Harvard University Press. p. 69. ISBN978-0-67-428368-8.
^ abArnold, N. Scott (2009). Imposing values: an essay on liberalism and regulation. Oxford University Press. p. 3. ISBN9780495501121. Archived from the original on October 2, 2020. Retrieved April 28, 2020. Modern liberalism occupies the left-of-center in the traditional political spectrum and is represented by the Democratic Party in the United States.
^Cite error: The named reference Harry Enten was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Rae, Nicol C. (June 2007). "Be Careful What You Wish For: The Rise of Responsible Parties in American National Politics". Annual Review of Political Science. 10 (1). Annual Reviews: 169–191. doi:10.1146/annurev.polisci.10.071105.100750. ISSN1094-2939. What are we to make of American parties at the dawn of the twenty-first century? ... The impact of the 1960s civil rights revolution has been to create two more ideologically coherent parties: a generally liberal or center-left party and a conservative party.
^Cronin, James E.; Ross, George W.; Shoch, James (August 24, 2011). "Introduction: The New World of the Center-Left". What's Left of the Left: Democrats and Social Democrats in Challenging Times. Duke University Press. ISBN978-0-8223-5079-8. Archived from the original on August 20, 2024. Retrieved August 7, 2024. pp. 17, 22, 182: Including the American Democratic Party in a comparative analysis of center-left parties is unorthodox, since unlike Europe, America has not produced a socialist movement tied to a strong union movement. Yet the Democrats may have become center-left before anyone else, obliged by their different historical trajectory to build complex alliances with social groups other than the working class and to deal with unusually powerful capitalists ... Taken together, the three chapters devoted to the United States show that the center-left in America faces much the same set of problems as elsewhere and, especially in light of the election results from 2008, that the Democratic Party's potential to win elections, despite its current slide in approval, may be at least equal to that of any center-left party in Europe ... Despite the setback in the 2010 midterms, together the foregoing trends have put the Democrats in a position to eventually build a dominant center-left majority in the United States.
^Bruner, Christopher (January 1, 2018). "Center-Left Politics and Corporate Governance: What Is the 'Progressive' Agenda?". Brigham Young University Law Review: 267–338. While these dynamics have remained have remained important to the Democratic Party's electoral strategy since the 1990s, the finance-driven coalition described above remains high controverisal and unstable, reflecting the fact that core intellectual and ideological tensions in the platform of the U.S. center-left persist.
^Galston, Willim (November 30, 2023). "What Today's Working Class Wants from Political Leaders". International Journal of Comparative Studies in International Relations and Development. 9 (1): 105–109. doi:10.48028/iiprds/ijcsird.v9.i1.07. The exit of the working class from the Democratic Party is a long saga that began in the late 1960s and culminated in Donald Trump's takeover of the Republican Party with themes that resonated among working class voters. During this period, Democrats along with center-left parties through Western democracies who have encountered similar difficulties have struggled to understand the sources of working-class disaffection and to craft remedies for it.
^Grigsby, Ellen (2008). Analyzing Politics: An Introduction to Political Science. Cengage Learning. pp. 106–107. ISBN9780495501121. Archived from the original on October 2, 2020. Retrieved April 28, 2020. In the United States, the Democratic Party represents itself as the liberal alternative to the Republicans, but its liberalism is for the most part the later version of liberalism—modern liberalism.
^Zelizer, Julian E. (February 15, 2015). "How Medicare Was Made". The New Yorker. Archived from the original on March 4, 2015. Retrieved August 23, 2022.
^Dayen, David (December 2, 2024). "What Is the Democratic Party?". The American Prospect. The statistic that best defines our politics over the past 20 years is this: Nine of the past ten national elections have resulted in a change in power in at least one chamber of Congress or the White House. (The sole outlier is 2012.) Several of those elections were considered at the time to be realignments that would lead to a sustained majority for one of the major parties.
^Cite error: The named reference Polarization by education was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
^Grossmann, Matt; Hopkins, David A. "Polarized by Degrees: How the Diploma Divide and the Culture War Transformed American Politics". Cambridge University Press. Retrieved May 23, 2024. Democrats have become the home of highly-educated citizens with progressive social views who prefer credentialed experts to make policy decisions, while Republicans have become the populist champions of white voters without college degrees who increasingly distrust teachers, scientists, journalists, universities, non-profit organizations, and even corporations.
^Miller, Gary; Schofield, Norman (2003). "Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States". American Political Science Review. 97 (2): 245–260. doi:10.1017/S0003055403000650 (inactive November 7, 2024). ISSN1537-5943. S2CID12885628. By 2000, however, the New Deal party alignment no longer captured patterns of partisan voting. In the intervening 40 years, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts had triggered an increasingly race-driven distinction between the parties. ... Goldwater won the electoral votes of five states of the Deep South in 1964, four of them states that had voted Democratic for 84 years (Califano 1991, 55). He forged a new identification of the Republican party with racial conservatism, reversing a century-long association of the GOP with racial liberalism. This in turn opened the door for Nixon's "Southern strategy" and the Reagan victories of the eighties.{{cite journal}}: CS1 maint: DOI inactive as of November 2024 (link)
^Levy, Jonah (2006). The State after Statism: New State Activities in the Age of Liberalization. Harvard University Press. p. 198. ISBN9780495501121. In the corporate governance area, the center-left repositioned itself to press for reform. The Democratic Party in the United States used the postbubble scandals and the collapse of share prices to attack the Republican Party ... Corporate governance reform fit surprisingly well within the contours of the center-left ideology. The Democratic Party and the SPD have both been committed to the development of the regulatory state as a counterweight to managerial authority, corporate power, and market failure.
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