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in general, the two-party system that has usually prevailed in the U.S.
Early Nonpartisanship.
The framers of the 
Constitution of the United States made no provision in the governmental structure for the functioning of political parties because they believed that parties were a source of corruption and an impediment to the freedom of people to judge issues on their merits. James Madison argued in his “Federalist Paper #10” against a system in which “factions” (his word for parties) might be able to seize control of the government (see Federalist, The). George Washington, in accordance with the thinking of his fellow Founding Fathers, included in his cabinet men of diverse political philosophies and policies.
Federalist and Democratic-Republican Parties.
Within a short time informal parties did develop, even though their adherents still insisted they disapproved of parties as a permanent feature in American politics. One faction, commonly identified with Secretary of the Treasury Alexander Hamilton and Vice-President John Adams, became known as the Federalist party. Federalists favored an active federal government, a Treasury that played a vital role in the nation's economic life, and a pro-British foreign policy. It drew especially strong support from merchants, manufacturers, and residents of New England. The other faction, whose central figures were Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson and fellow Virginian James Madison, became known as the Republican or Democratic-Republican party (this party should not be confused with the modern Republican party; see below). The Jeffersonian Republicans advocated a limited federal government, little government interference in economic affairs, and a pro-French foreign policy. They were particularly popular with debt-ridden farmers, artisans, and southerners.
The structure of government in the U.S. was conducive to the formation of political parties. The carefully elaborated system of checks and balances, established by the Constitution, makes executive and legislative cooperation necessary in the development of policy. Further, the division of legislative powers between the federal and state governments, as provided in the Constitution, makes it necessary for advocates of such policies as the regulation of commerce to seek representation or strength in both the federal and state legislatures. As these ends were too complex and difficult to achieve by impermanent groupings, the formation of permanent political organizations was inevitable.
The Jeffersonian Republicans held power for 28 years following the inauguration of President Jefferson in 1801. During this period, the Federalist party became increasingly unpopular. It ceased functioning on the national level after the War of 1812, leaving the Republican party as the only national political organization.
New Political Alignments.
Far-reaching changes in the U.S. economy and social structure resulted in the gradual formation of new political alignments within a one-party system. The principal changes behind these developments were: (1) the expansion of the country westward, with an accompanying development of a large class of pioneer farmers, whose frontier communities represented a type of democratic society never before seen in any country; (2) the agricultural revolution in the southern states, following both the invention of the cotton gin by Eli Whitney and the development of textile machinery, which resulted in the dynamic growth of the slave system producing cotton; and (3) a considerable growth in the wealth and influence of manufacturers, merchants, bondholders, and land speculators of the northern states. The ideas of limited government that became known as Jeffersonian democracy appealed strongly to the sectional and class interests of the western frontier and the South, and also to the growing class of urban workers. The policies once advocated by the defunct Federalist party, however, were still popular with the minority of Americans who favored a more active economic role for the federal government.
Revived Two-Party System.
The second two-party system developed gradually as Republicans began quarreling over several issues. The followers of Henry Clay and John Quincy Adams, who asserted that the federal government should actively promote economic development, became known as National Republicans. Their opponents, who eventually united behind the presidential candidacy of Andrew Jackson, were first known as Democratic-Republicans and by 1828 as the Democratic party.
During Jackson's tenure as president, his controversial policies and contentious personality prevented any reconciliation with the National Republicans. By the middle of Jackson's second term, his opponents began to call themselves the Whig party. Leaders of the party included Daniel Webster and Henry Clay.
During the 1830s the Locofocos, a radical splinter group of the Democratic party in New York City, opposed monopolies and private bankers. The name was derived from a popular brand of matches used by the group to continue a crucial meeting in 1835, at which probank opponents turned off the gas. Later known as the Equal Rights party, the Locofocos were conciliated and reabsorbed into the Democratic party following the election of Martin Van Buren in 1836.
The Democrats controlled the national government for most of the years between 1828 and 1860, although they lost two presidential elections to Whig military heroes. After 1840 the Democratic party became more and more the mouthpiece of the slaveholders. Northern Democratic leaders were often called “doughfaces,” or northern men with southern principles, by opponents. Opposed to the Democrats were the Whigs and a variety of minor parties, such as the Liberty party, the political arm of the abolitionists, and the Free-Soil party.
In 1854 the party system dominated by Whigs and Democrats collapsed due to the controversy sparked by the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which made it possible to establish slavery in western territories, where it had previously been banned. This act outraged northerners and convinced many Democrats and Whigs in that region to abandon their parties. Many of these voters initially joined the Know-Nothing party, an anti-Catholic, anti-immigrant organization whose antislavery reputation in the North helped it attract more than 1 million members (see Know-Nothings).
The creation of a new Republican party was the most important result of the Kansas controversy. Organized in some places as early as July 1854, the party promised not only to prevent the admission of new slave states to the Union, but also to diminish slaveholders' influence in the federal government. The appeal of this platform quickly enabled the Republican party to overpower the Know-Nothings. Although the Republicans lost their first campaign for the presidency in 1856, they triumphed in 1860 with Abraham Lincoln. The Republican victory resulted in part from the division of the Democratic party into northern and southern factions, each of which ran its own presidential candidate, and in part from their success at attracting Whigs and Know-Nothings who had opposed the Republicans in 1856. During the Civil War, the Republicans temporarily called themselves the Union party in an attempt to win the votes of prowar Democrats.
Post–Civil War Period.
After the Civil War, as U.S. industrialization proceeded at great speed, the Republican party became the champion of the manufacturing interests, railroad builders, speculators, and financiers of the country, and to a lesser extent, of the workers of the North and West. The Democratic party was revived after the war as a party of opposition; its strength lay primarily in the South, where it was seen as the champion of the lost Confederate cause. Support also came from immigrants and those who opposed the Republicans' Reconstruction policies. The chief political tactic of both parties during the postwar period was “waving the bloody shirt,” by which Republicans in the North and Democrats in the South charged that a vote for the opposition was unpatriotic. Serious policy issues also separated the two parties. The most significant points of disagreement included the advocacy of high tariffs by the Republicans and of low customs duties by the Democrats, and the emphasis laid by the Democrats of the rights of states in contrast to Republican nationalism.
A number of minor parties and factions emerged during the postwar period. In 1872 Republicans dissatisfied with President Ulysses S. Grant formed the short-lived Liberal Republican party and nominated as their candidate the journalist Horace Greeley. Although he was also endorsed by the Democrats, Greeley was defeated, and his new party collapsed.
In the long years of agricultural depression from the conclusion of the Civil War to the end of the 19th century, discontent among farmers, particularly in the western plains but also in the South, constituted a fertile source of political activity, giving rise to the Granger and Populist movements (see Granger Movement; Populism). From these movements evolved a considerable number of organizations, constituted for the most part on a regional and state basis (see Farmers' Alliances; Greenback-Labor party; Greenback party; People's party).
In industrialized regions, a large class of wage workers developed, whose protests against poor working conditions, low pay, and discriminatory and abusive treatment induced the formation of other parties independent of and opposed to the dominant Republican and Democratic parties. One of the first was the Socialist Labor party, founded in 1877 but unimportant until it came under the leadership of Daniel De Leon. Of far more significance was the Socialist Party of America (SPA), founded in 1901 by socialists unable to accept the autocratic De Leon (see Socialist party). The greatest leader of the SPA was Eugene V. Debs. In 1919 a split in the SPA led to the formation of the Communist party (CP), which had close ties with the Soviet Union. Although small, the CP had considerable influence at times, especially in the labor movement during the 1930s. These parties of agrarian and working-class protest frequently raised issues that were taken up in subsequent years by leaders of the major parties; their own successes in elections, however, were mostly local and minor.
Progressivism.
The various movements to improve industrial working conditions and curtail the power of big business, known by the early 20th century as Progressivism, caused divisions within both parties between Progressives and conservatives. The most serious split occurred in the Republican ranks, where the renomination of President William Howard Taft in 1912 caused Progressives to bolt and form the Progressive (or Bull Moose) party, which nominated former President Theodore Roosevelt. Although he lost the election, Roosevelt polled about 28 percent of the popular vote—the highest percentage ever attained by a third-party candidate. The Republican split in that contest helped Woodrow Wilson become only the second Democrat to win the presidency since the Civil War. The Progressives made another strong bid for the presidency in 1924, when their candidate was Sen. Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, a veteran of the 1912 campaign, who won about 16 percent of the popular vote.
The New Deal and After.
Although the Republican party regained control of the presidency during the 1920s, complex changes in political alignments were wrought by the Great Depression of the 1930s. The Democratic party, led by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, became the sponsor of the most far-reaching social-reform legislation in the history of the U.S. (see New Deal). Many of its policies were supported by representatives of the Republican party, as well as by those who had previously supported La Follette. The attraction of Roosevelt's party was so great that such nominally independent political organizations as the American Labor Party and the Liberal Party in New York State became, in effect, mere adjuncts of the Democratic party.
Roosevelt managed to break the stranglehold that Republicans had held over the presidency by drawing various new forces into the Democratic party. These included blacks, who traditionally had voted Republican because that party had ended slavery, but now supported the Democrats out of gratitude for New Deal unemployment relief. The other key addition was organized labor, which recognized that New Deal policies had helped unions achieve a status unprecedented in U.S. history.
When Roosevelt died in 1945, he was succeeded by Vice-President Harry S. Truman. Democratic unity appeared to unravel when two dissident groups opposed him in the 1948 election: the anti–cold war Progressives under Henry A. Wallace and the anti–civil rights Dixiecrats under Strom Thurmond. Truman won despite them, however, and the Democrats held the White House until the election of 1952. That November the Republicans were carried to victory by their popular candidate, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower. During Eisenhower's two terms, his moderate supporters came into conflict with the more conservative Old Guard Republicans. From 1955 onward the Democrats were in control of Congress, and their leaders often cooperated with the moderate Republicans.
The Decline of Party Influence.
The New Deal combination of the South and the industrial North came together again to win the presidency for Democrat John F. Kennedy in 1960 and again for Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, but widespread dissatisfaction with Johnson's military escalation in Vietnam brought the Republicans back into office under Richard M. Nixon in 1968. Although he was reelected with strong support from the South and West in 1972, Nixon was later forced to resign as a result of his involvement in a conspiracy to obstruct justice (see Watergate). The Democrats bolstered their declining strength in the South by nominating the former governor of Georgia, Jimmy Carter, in 1976. Carter defeated the Republican president Gerald R. Ford in that year, but failed to win reelection against Ronald Reagan in 1980. Under Reagan's leadership, conservative Republicans consolidated their hold over the party. Republicans held a majority in the U.S. Senate from 1981 through 1986, when the Democrats regained control (they had maintained their majority in the House since the midterm election of 1954). After Carter's defeat and the apparent breakup of the New Deal coalition, the Democrats did not have the strong leadership necessary to regain the presidency during the 1980s.
Third-party movements were significant in 1968, in 1980, and especially in 1992, when a billionaire businessman, H. Ross Perot, drew almost 19 percent of the popular vote, the highest for a third-party presidential candidate since Theodore Roosevelt's run in 1912. Perot demonstrated nationwide appeal to voters disenchanted with “politics as usual,” but he gained no electoral votes in 1992, and Democrat Bill Clinton defeated President George H. W. Bush. In the midterm election of 1994, with Clinton's popularity at low ebb, Republicans gained control of both the House and the Senate for the first time in 40 years. Two years later Clinton, having regained his footing, became the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a second successive term in the White House. Although the Democrats retained the presidency in 1996, the Republicans kept their majorities in both the Senate and the House, marking the first time since the late 1920s that Republicans comprised a majority of the House for two consecutive sessions. Third parties played a less prominent role in the 1996 campaign: Perot, who ran on the Reform party ticket, saw his share of the popular vote drop by more than half.
Republicans, who expected to widen their majorities in both the House and the Senate in 1998, squandered numerous advantages in the months leading up to the election. Although Democrats failed to win back control of Congress in November, they cut the Republican margin in the House, making this the first midterm election since 1934 in which the party that held the presidency gained seats in the House. The Reform party fielded candidates in more than 30 states, and in Minnesota Jesse Ventura (1951– ), a former professional wrestler, radio talk-show host, and mayor of Brooklyn Park, became the first Reform party candidate to win a state governorship. A little more than a year later, Ventura cut his ties with the national organization, which he described as “hopelessly dysfunctional,” following a power struggle between his supporters and a faction aligned with Perot. Ventura decided not to run for a second term in 2002.
Political Parties in the 21st Century.
As the 21st century began, the two major parties remained important as instruments for raising and disbursing hundreds of millions of dollars in political contributions. In other respects, however, the party system was much weaker than it had been in 1960. Voters had grown disillusioned with politicians and appeared to be influenced more by a candidate's overall message or positions on the issues than by party affiliation. Campaign techniques were changed by the increasing use of television advertisements, often harshly negative in tone. Media advisers became more prominent, sometimes eclipsing traditional party leaders. In addition, the prevalence of primary elections frequently reduced the role of national party conventions from that of selecting the nominees to merely ratifying choices the voters and candidates had made months earlier. As the conventions became more predictable and less newsworthy, coverage by the major commercial broadcast television networks diminished, and viewership correspondingly declined.
Few political battles in U.S. history have been so closely contested or narrowly won as the 2000 presidential and congressional elections. With more than 100 million votes cast for president, fewer than 550,000 votes separated the Democratic and Republican nominees; although he finished second in the popular vote, the Republican candidate, George W. Bush, emerged with a slim electoral-college margin. In congressional races, Republicans held a slender majority in the House but saw their Senate lead drop to a 50-50 tie, with Vice-President Dick Cheney casting the deciding vote in favor of the GOP. The Green party, led by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, won 3 percent of the popular vote for president, much of it drawn from voters who, according to exit polls, would otherwise have cast their ballots for Al Gore, the Democratic candidate. The Reform party, weakened by internal dissension, turned out less than 1 percent of the popular vote for its presidential nominee, Patrick J. Buchanan (1938– ), a former Republican who ran as a right-wing populist.
The Republicans—who lost control of the Senate in 2001 when Vermont Senator James M. (Jim) Jeffords (1934– ) switched his allegiance from Republican to Independent and began voting with the Democrats on organizational matters—reclaimed their hold over the Senate and increased their majority in the House in the general election of November 2002. The GOP strategy successfully focused voters' attention on national security issues, instead of the stalled U.S. economy, and made effective use of the president's popularity and fund-raising ability to boost Republican congressional candidates. The Democrats' failure to articulate clear campaign themes contributed to the party's weak showing.
The war in Iraq, homeland security, and economic uncertainties dominated the campaign debate in 2004. The two parties competed fiercely for a relatively small pool of undecided voters, while mounting large registration drives and get-out-the-vote efforts to maximize turnout among core supporters; as a result, more than 122 million Americans cast ballots in the November election. Guided by senior political adviser Karl Rove (1950– ), whose campaign strategy relied heavily on appeals to conservative Christians, President Bush was reelected with about 51 percent of the popular vote; his Democratic opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, won 48 percent. Votes for third parties continued to decline, with Nader (running this time as an independent) receiving less than 1 percent of the total vote. In other contests, Republicans strengthened their hold on both the Senate and the House, while Democrats made a comeback in state legislative races.
Two years later, Republicans faced formidable problems, many of them self-inflicted. Unhappy with Bush, frustrated by the Iraq war, and upset at scandals involving Republican leaders, moderate and independent voters embraced the Democrats' message of change. Repeated efforts by the GOP to mobilize its conservative base did little to mollify independents, who, according to exit polls, voted for Democratic congressional candidates by a margin of 59-37 percent. (Independents had favored Democratic candidates by 49-46 percent in 2004.) The Republicans surrendered control of the House and the Senate, and suffered setbacks in races for state governorships and legislative offices; not a single Democratic congressional or gubernatorial incumbent was unseated by a Republican challenger in November 2006.
