===== Democratic Party - History =====

This article traces the organizational, ideological, and electoral history of the Democratic Party of the United States from its founding in the 1820s through the present. For overview, positions, and current structure, see [[democratic-party]]. For related history, see [[republican-party-history]] and [[american-political-parties-history]].

===== Origins and the Jacksonian Era (1828-1848) =====

The Democratic Party traces its institutional origin to the presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson in 1828, though its ideological roots reach further into the Democratic-Republican coalition that had dominated federal politics since the 1790s. After the collapse of the First Party System and the splintering of the Democratic-Republicans following the contested 1824 election, Jackson's supporters organized under the Democratic-Republican label before shortening the name to Democratic Party by the early 1830s.

Jackson won the presidency in 1828 against incumbent John Quincy Adams, running on a platform emphasizing popular sovereignty, hostility to concentrated financial power, and the interests of yeoman farmers and working-class white men. His supporters built a durable organizational apparatus - mass conventions, partisan newspapers, and local committees - that established the model for American party machinery.

The party's first major legislative fight was over rechartering the Second Bank of the United States. Jackson vetoed the recharterization bill in 1832, framing the bank as a corrupt monopoly serving Eastern and European elites at the expense of ordinary citizens. Congress failed to override the veto. Jackson subsequently ordered federal deposits withdrawn from the bank and placed in state-chartered institutions, a decision the Senate censured in 1834.

The Nullification Crisis of 1832-1833 fractured Jackson's coalition. South Carolina, led by Vice President John C. Calhoun, declared federal tariffs null and void within state borders. Jackson issued a proclamation rejecting nullification as treason and requested congressional authority to use force. The crisis was resolved through a compromise tariff brokered by Henry Clay, but it surfaced tensions between the party's nationalist and states'-rights wings that persisted for decades.

Martin Van Buren, Jackson's chosen successor, won the 1836 election but presided over the Panic of 1837 and the ensuing depression. His proposal for an Independent Treasury - removing federal funds from all banks entirely - divided the party. Congress passed the Independent Treasury Act in 1840; it was repealed under the succeeding Whig administration and reinstated in 1846.

===== Slavery, Sectionalism, and Fragmentation (1848-1861) =====

The annexation of Texas (1845) and the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) forced the slavery question into the center of Democratic politics. The Wilmot Proviso, which would have banned slavery in any territory acquired from Mexico, passed the House twice with support from Northern Democrats before dying in the Senate. Its failure deepened sectional distrust within the party.

The Compromise of 1850, engineered in part by Democratic Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, temporarily stabilized the national coalition by admitting California as a free state, organizing the remaining Mexican cession territories without restriction on slavery, strengthening the Fugitive Slave Act, and abolishing the slave trade (but not slavery) in the District of Columbia.

Douglas's Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise line and introduced "popular sovereignty" - the principle that settlers of a territory would decide the slavery question themselves. The act shattered the existing party alignment. Northern Democrats who opposed it joined anti-Nebraska Whigs, Free Soilers, and others to form the Republican Party. Southern Democrats largely supported the measure.

Violence in Kansas between pro- and anti-slavery settlers between 1854 and 1861 - known as "Bleeding Kansas" - became a national political crisis. Democrats in Congress backed competing Kansas constitutions, with the Buchanan administration supporting the pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution against Douglas's opposition.

The 1860 presidential election ended in a four-way split. Northern Democrats nominated Douglas on a popular-sovereignty platform. Southern Democrats, rejecting Douglas, nominated Vice President John C. Breckinridge of Kentucky on an explicit slave-protection platform. John Bell of Tennessee ran on the Constitutional Union ticket. Abraham Lincoln won with an exclusively Northern electoral coalition. Breckinridge carried most of the Deep South; Douglas finished second in the popular vote but carried only Missouri and part of New Jersey.

===== The Civil War and Reconstruction (1861-1877) =====

With Southern members absent after secession, the congressional Democratic Party shrank to a Northern rump. Northern Democrats split between "War Democrats," who supported prosecuting the war to restore the Union, and "Peace Democrats" (pejoratively called Copperheads), who sought a negotiated settlement. War Democrats served in Lincoln's cabinet and army commands; Ohio congressman Clement Vallandigham became the most prominent Copperhead voice.

The party nominated General George McClellan for president in 1864 on a platform calling the war a failure, though McClellan personally rejected the peace plank. Lincoln won re-election decisively.

Reconstruction policy became the party's central opposition issue from 1865 onward. Congressional Republicans imposed military occupation of the former Confederate states and made readmission contingent on ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment and black male suffrage. Democrats uniformly opposed these measures, arguing for rapid restoration of Southern state governments and white self-rule.

The 1868 Democratic National Convention nominated former New York Governor Horatio Seymour. His running mate, Francis Preston Blair Jr., openly called for the incoming president to declare Reconstruction acts void and allow Southern whites to reclaim their governments. Ulysses Grant won. The 1872 nomination went to Horace Greeley, the Liberal Republican candidate, as Democrats attempted fusion against Grant; Greeley died before the electoral votes were counted.

The Compromise of 1877, which ended the disputed Hayes-Tilden election, effectively ended Reconstruction. Federal troops were withdrawn from the South; Republican state governments in the remaining occupied states collapsed. Democratic parties regained control of Southern state governments and began constructing the legal framework of racial segregation.

===== The Bourbon Democrats and the Gilded Age (1877-1896) =====

The post-Reconstruction Democratic Party was dominated nationally by the "Bourbon Democrats" - conservative, economically orthodox leaders identified with business interests, hard money (the gold standard), low tariffs, and minimal government intervention. The faction's name was applied by critics suggesting they learned nothing and forgot nothing, as the Bourbon royal dynasty had allegedly been described.

Grover Cleveland, elected in 1884, was the first Democrat to win the presidency since James Buchanan in 1856. Cleveland governed as a Bourbon: he vetoed pension bills as fiscally irresponsible, favored tariff reduction, and opposed silver coinage. He lost re-election in 1888 to Benjamin Harrison despite winning the popular vote - the second such outcome in American history - then won again in 1892.

Cleveland's second term coincided with the Panic of 1893 and a severe depression. His insistence on maintaining the gold standard and his use of federal troops against the Pullman Strike in 1894 alienated labor and agrarian wings of the party. Democrats suffered catastrophic losses in the 1894 midterm elections.

The agrarian and silver factions, strongest in the South and West, had been building strength through the Farmers' Alliance and the nascent Populist Party. Their core demand was monetary inflation through free coinage of silver at a 16-to-1 ratio with gold, which they argued would relieve rural debtors.

===== Bryan, Populism, and the 1896 Realignment =====

At the 1896 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, William Jennings Bryan of Nebraska delivered his "Cross of Gold" speech attacking the gold standard as an instrument of Eastern creditor interests. The convention nominated Bryan and adopted a silver platform. Gold Democrats, refusing to accept the nomination, ran their own candidate (John Palmer) or backed the Republican William McKinley.

Bryan also accepted the Populist Party's nomination, merging the two organizations in practice. McKinley won, carrying the Northeast and Midwest. Bryan's coalition of Southern and Western agrarians lacked the urban industrial vote. The 1896 election is regarded by political scientists as a "realigning election" that cemented Republican dominance for the next generation.

Bryan was nominated again in 1900 and 1908; he lost both times. His three nominations made him the dominant figure in the party for sixteen years despite never winning the presidency.

===== Progressivism and Woodrow Wilson (1896-1920) =====

The early twentieth century brought Democratic engagement with Progressive Era reform - regulation of industry, labor protections, direct election of senators, and electoral reforms including the primary system. The party's progressive and conservative factions competed for control throughout the period.

Woodrow Wilson, governor of New Jersey, secured the 1912 nomination on the forty-sixth ballot after a deadlocked convention. He won the presidency with 42 percent of the popular vote as Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party split the Republican vote. Wilson's "New Freedom" program produced substantial legislation in his first term: the Federal Reserve Act (1913), the Federal Trade Commission Act (1914), and the Clayton Antitrust Act (1914).

Wilson ran for re-election in 1916 on the slogan "He kept us out of war." The United States entered the First World War in April 1917 after German resumption of unrestricted submarine warfare and the revelation of the Zimmermann Telegram. Wilson led the war effort and proposed the Fourteen Points as the basis for a postwar settlement. His Covenant of the League of Nations was rejected by the Senate, led by Republican Henry Cabot Lodge, after Wilson refused to accept reservations.

The Wilson administration presided over the re-segregation of the federal civil service, the rollback of positions held by black federal employees since Reconstruction, and the screening of D.W. Griffith's "Birth of a Nation" at the White House. These actions were consistent with Wilson's stated racial views and the preferences of the Southern Democratic bloc that formed a core constituency.

The 1918 midterms returned Republican majorities in both chambers. Wilson's stroke in October 1919, suffered during a speaking tour to build public support for the League, effectively ended his presidency. The 1920 Democratic nominee, James Cox of Ohio, lost to Warren Harding in a landslide.

===== The 1920s: Klan, Prohibition, and Internal Division =====

The Democratic Party of the 1920s was deeply divided between its Southern and rural constituencies - predominantly Protestant, dry on Prohibition, and in many areas aligned with the revived Ku Klux Klan - and its Northern urban constituencies, which were heavily Catholic, wet, and ethnically diverse.

The 1924 convention in New York City became the longest and most fractious in party history. A platform plank explicitly condemning the Ku Klux Klan failed by a narrow margin. The convention deadlocked between Al Smith of New York and William Gibbs McAdoo of California (backed by Klan-sympathetic delegates) for 103 ballots before nominating compromise candidate John W. Davis, who lost to Calvin Coolidge.

Al Smith won the 1928 nomination and became the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party. His opposition to Prohibition and his New York background alienated rural and Southern voters. Herbert Hoover won decisively, and Smith failed to carry several traditionally Democratic Southern states.

===== The New Deal Coalition (1929-1945) =====

The stock market crash of October 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression destroyed Republican political dominance. Franklin D. Roosevelt, governor of New York, won the 1932 nomination and defeated Hoover by a wide margin.

Roosevelt's New Deal was not a unified ideological program but a series of legislative and administrative responses to the Depression's successive crises. The First Hundred Days (March-June 1933) produced the Emergency Banking Act, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and numerous other measures. The administration suspended the gold standard for domestic transactions in 1933; the international gold convertibility of the dollar was ended under Nixon in 1971.

The New Deal coalition that formed around Roosevelt became the defining Democratic alignment for a generation. It combined Southern white voters (the "Solid South" inherited from Reconstruction), Northern industrial workers organized through the newly empowered union movement, Catholics, urban ethnic communities, Jewish voters, black voters in Northern cities (who shifted from the party of Lincoln in substantial numbers for the first time), and progressive intellectuals.

The Southern Democratic bloc supported New Deal economic measures while insisting that programs be administered in ways preserving racial hierarchy - particularly that federal relief and labor programs not disturb the Southern agricultural wage structure or challenge segregation. Black workers were excluded from or received inferior benefits under the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Labor Relations Act (which did not cover domestic and agricultural workers), and Social Security's original framework.

Roosevelt won re-election in 1936 by the largest electoral margin since 1820 and again in 1940, breaking the two-term precedent set by Washington. His 1940 decision to seek a third term was made amid the European war; Germany had occupied France in June. The 1940 Democratic convention adopted his choice of Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace as vice president over the objections of party regulars.

Roosevelt sought and won a fourth term in 1944, replacing Wallace on the ticket with Missouri Senator Harry S. Truman, a compromise acceptable to both party factions. Roosevelt died on April 12, 1945, thirteen weeks into his fourth term.

===== Truman, Civil Rights Fractures, and the Cold War (1945-1960) =====

Harry Truman inherited the presidency as the war in Europe neared its end. His administration ordered the use of atomic weapons against Hiroshima (August 6, 1945) and Nagasaki (August 9, 1945), ending the Pacific war. Truman presided over the founding of the United Nations, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin Airlift, and the creation of NATO.

The 1948 election produced the most significant third-party split in the party's modern history. The Democratic platform included a civil rights plank stronger than any the party had previously adopted, driven by Minneapolis Mayor Hubert Humphrey's floor speech. Southern delegates led by Mississippi's Fielding Wright and South Carolina Governor Strom Thurmond walked out and formed the States' Rights Democratic Party (Dixiecrats), nominating Thurmond for president. Simultaneously, Henry Wallace led a left-wing Progressive Party challenge. Truman, widely expected to lose, defeated Republican Thomas Dewey. Thurmond carried four Deep South states.

Truman desegregated the armed forces by executive order in 1948 (Executive Order 9981). His administration prosecuted Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act, initiated federal employee loyalty programs, and supported the military intervention in Korea after the North Korean invasion in June 1950. The Korean War ended in armistice in 1953 under Eisenhower.

The Democrats lost the White House in 1952 and 1956 to Dwight Eisenhower. Adlai Stevenson of Illinois carried the Democratic nomination both times and lost both times.

John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts won the 1960 nomination and defeated Richard Nixon in the general election, becoming the first Catholic elected president. His margin was narrow: 0.17 percentage points in the popular vote. Kennedy selected Senate Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson of Texas as his running mate, a choice designed to hold the Southern wing.

===== The 1960s: Great Society, Civil Rights, and Fracture =====

Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on November 22, 1963. Lyndon Johnson, succeeding to the presidency, pressed for passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - which Kennedy had introduced but could not move through Congress - using his legislative expertise and the political weight of mourning.

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin in public accommodations and employment. The Voting Rights Act of 1965, passed after the Selma-to-Montgomery marches and the violence at the Edmund Pettus Bridge, prohibited discriminatory voting practices and authorized federal oversight of elections in jurisdictions with histories of discrimination. Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act in 1968 following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Johnson's Great Society program added Medicare, Medicaid, federal education funding, immigration reform (the Hart-Celler Act, eliminating national-origin quotas), and the creation of new federal agencies. The 1964 election produced a Democratic landslide; Johnson carried 44 states against Republican Barry Goldwater.

The escalation of the Vietnam War increasingly defined and divided the Johnson presidency. By 1967, antiwar sentiment was strong enough within the party to generate serious primary challenges. Senator Eugene McCarthy of Minnesota entered the 1968 New Hampshire primary as an antiwar candidate and came within 7 points of Johnson. Johnson announced he would not seek re-election in March 1968. Robert Kennedy entered the race; he was assassinated in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968, the night he won the California primary.

The 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago was held amid protests outside the convention hall. Police clashed violently with demonstrators in Grant Park. Inside, Hubert Humphrey, who had not competed in any primaries, won the nomination on the first ballot by controlling the party machinery. McCarthy's and Kennedy's antiwar delegates were in the minority. Senator George McGovern briefly held Kennedy's delegates as a placeholder.

Humphrey lost the general election to Nixon, with Alabama Governor George Wallace carrying five Deep South states as an independent candidate. The combined Wallace and Nixon vote in the South overwhelmed Humphrey.

The 1968 debacle prompted the party to reform its delegate selection rules through the McGovern-Fraser Commission (1969-1972), which required state parties to adopt procedures ensuring proportional representation and broader participation, effectively ending the brokered convention era.

===== McGovern, Carter, and the Post-New Deal Transition (1968-1980) =====

George McGovern, who had chaired the reform commission, won the 1972 nomination through the new primary-centered process. His convention coalition was notably different in composition from previous Democratic gatherings - younger, more female, more racially diverse - and notably thin in representation from organized labor and urban machines. McGovern lost to Nixon in one of the largest landslides in American history, carrying only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.

Nixon's resignation in August 1974 following the Watergate scandal revived Democratic fortunes. The 1974 midterms brought a large class of reform-minded Democrats ("Watergate babies") into Congress.

Jimmy Carter, former governor of Georgia and a political outsider with no Washington base, won the 1976 nomination and defeated incumbent Gerald Ford narrowly. Carter's administration achieved the Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel (1978) but faced the Iranian hostage crisis (beginning November 4, 1979), the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a second oil shock, and high inflation combined with high unemployment ("stagflation"). Edward Kennedy challenged Carter in the 1980 primaries; Carter prevailed but was damaged. Ronald Reagan defeated Carter decisively in the general election. The composition of the Reagan coalition - and the relative weight of racial politics, economic anxiety, and cultural realignment in drawing working-class white voters, Catholics, and Southerners away from the Democratic Party - is addressed in [[democratic-party-controversy-southern-realignment-controversy]].

===== The Reagan Years and the New Democrats (1980-1992) =====

The Democratic Party spent the 1980s debating the causes of and responses to its electoral decline. Walter Mondale, the 1984 nominee, ran on a traditional New Deal liberal platform; he carried only Minnesota and the District of Columbia. Michael Dukakis, the 1988 nominee, ran a campaign focused on competence over ideology and lost to George H.W. Bush.

Within the party, a faction calling itself the New Democrats, organized through the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC, founded 1985), argued that the party had moved too far left on cultural and economic issues and needed to reclaim the ideological center. Key figures included senators Sam Nunn, Al Gore, and later Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton.

Jesse Jackson's Rainbow Coalition candidacies in 1984 and 1988 demonstrated the mobilizing potential of black voters and liberal constituencies and added immigration, Palestinian rights, and economic justice to Democratic primary debate. Jackson finished second in delegates in 1988.

===== Clinton and the Third Way (1992-2000) =====

Bill Clinton won the 1992 nomination as an explicit New Democrat, arguing for welfare reform, free trade, fiscal discipline, and "a government that is both progressive and fiscally responsible." He defeated incumbent Bush in a three-way race in which independent Ross Perot drew 19 percent of the popular vote.

Clinton's first term included passage of the Family and Medical Leave Act, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), and the failed health care reform initiative led by Hillary Rodham Clinton. Democrats lost the House in 1994 for the first time since 1952, with Republicans under Newt Gingrich winning 54 seats.

Clinton moved to the center after the 1994 losses, working with the Republican Congress to pass welfare reform (the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, 1996), telecommunications deregulation, and a balanced budget. He won re-election in 1996 over Bob Dole.

Clinton was impeached by the House in December 1998 on charges of perjury and obstruction of justice related to his affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. The Senate acquitted him on both counts in February 1999.

Al Gore, Clinton's vice president, won the 2000 nomination. The general election against George W. Bush produced one of the closest outcomes in American history. Gore won the popular vote by over 500,000 votes. The Florida recount was halted by the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in Bush v. Gore, awarding Florida's electoral votes - and the presidency - to Bush.

===== Opposition, Iraq, and the Obama Coalition (2000-2016) =====

Democrats voted in substantial numbers for the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq in October 2002, including Senators Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, and John Edwards. The Iraq War's declining popularity became the central issue of the 2004 Democratic primary. Kerry won the nomination and lost the general election to Bush; the outcome turned in part on the Ohio result.

Barack Obama, a first-term senator from Illinois, announced his candidacy in February 2007. His 2008 primary contest against Hillary Clinton, the early front-runner, extended through all fifty states before Obama secured enough delegates in June. He became the first African-American nominated for president by a major party. Obama defeated Senator John McCain in the general election, carrying states including Indiana, North Carolina, and Virginia that had not voted Democratic for president in decades.

The Obama administration passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (2009), the Affordable Care Act (2010), and the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act (2010). Democrats lost the House in 2010 in a midterm wave driven in part by opposition to the Affordable Care Act.

Obama won re-election in 2012 against Mitt Romney. Democrats lost the Senate in 2014.

Hillary Clinton, the prohibitive favorite, won the 2016 Democratic primary over Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, whose democratic socialist platform attracted strong support from younger voters. Sanders's supporters argued the Democratic National Committee and the primary process were tilted against him; internal DNC communications published by WikiLeaks during the convention showed staff communications hostile to Sanders.

Clinton lost the general election to Donald Trump, winning the popular vote by nearly 2.9 million votes but losing the Electoral College 306-232. Trump carried the decisive Rust Belt states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin by narrow margins, flipping voters in working-class communities that had voted Democratic in previous presidential elections.

===== The Trump Era and After (2016-present) =====

Democrats regained the House majority in 2018, with a class that included the first Muslim women elected to Congress and the youngest woman ever elected to Congress to that point. Speaker Nancy Pelosi returned to the speakership.

The House impeached Trump in December 2019 on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress related to his communications with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. The Senate acquitted him in February 2020.

Joe Biden, former vice president, won the 2020 Democratic primary after a competitive multi-candidate field that included Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Kamala Harris, and others. Biden selected California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate, the first woman, first African-American, and first South Asian-American on a major-party presidential ticket. Biden won the general election 306-232 in the Electoral College, with a popular vote margin of over 7 million.

Trump was impeached a second time in January 2021, following the January 6 Capitol breach, on a charge of incitement of insurrection. The Senate acquitted him after his term ended, with ten House Republicans having voted for impeachment.

Biden signed the American Rescue Plan (2021), the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (2021), the CHIPS and Science Act (2022), and the Inflation Reduction Act (2022) into law. Democrats lost the House in the 2022 midterms, though by a smaller margin than historical patterns predicted.

Biden announced in July 2024 that he would not seek re-election. Kamala Harris became the presumptive nominee without a contested primary and won the Democratic nomination at the 2024 convention. She selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate. Donald Trump defeated Harris in the November 2024 general election, winning both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

===== Controversies =====

Whether the New Deal coalition's durability depended structurally on accommodation of Southern segregation, and whether this accommodation shaped the design of New Deal programs in ways that had lasting effects on racial economic disparity, is contested among historians. See [[democratic-party-controversy-new-deal-race-controversy]] and [[democratic-party-viewpoint-new-deal-segregation-viewpoint-debate]].

The question of when, why, and how completely the South shifted from Democratic to Republican between 1948 and 1994 - and the relative weight of racial politics, economic development, religious realignment, and Cold War anticommunism in that shift - remains an active historical debate. See [[democratic-party-controversy-southern-realignment-controversy]].

Whether the 1968 convention reforms democratized the party or transferred power from organized labor and urban constituencies to a college-educated activist class, and whether this contributed to subsequent electoral losses, is contested. See [[democratic-party-controversy-mcgovern-fraser-commission-controversy]].

Whether Clinton's 1994 crime bill (the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act) contributed to mass incarceration disproportionately affecting black communities, or whether it reflected the preferences of black political leadership at the time, is actively disputed. See [[democratic-party-controversy-1994-crime-bill-controversy]].

Whether the Democratic Party's 2016 primary process was conducted fairly with respect to the Sanders campaign, and what weight the published DNC communications deserve as evidence, is contested. See [[democratic-party-controversy-2016-democratic-primary-controversy]].

===== Footnotes =====

1. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., //The Age of Jackson// (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945).

2. Sean Wilentz, //The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln// (New York: Norton, 2005).

3. Eric Foner, //Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863-1877// (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).

4. Richard Hofstadter, //The American Political Tradition and the Men Who Made It// (New York: Knopf, 1948).

5. C. Vann Woodward, //Origins of the New South, 1877-1913// (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1951).

6. Robert A. Caro, //The Years of Lyndon Johnson//, 4 vols. (New York: Knopf, 1982-2012).

7. Taylor Branch, //America in the King Years//, 3 vols. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1988-2006).

8. Theodore H. White, //The Making of the President// series (New York: Atheneum, 1961-1973).

9. Kenneth S. Baer, //Reinventing Democrats: The Politics of Liberalism from Reagan to Clinton// (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000).

10. John B. Judis and Ruy Teixeira, //The Emerging Democratic Majority// (New York: Scribner, 2002).

11. Thomas Ferguson and Joel Rogers, //Right Turn: The Decline of the Democrats and the Future of American Politics// (New York: Hill and Wang, 1986).

12. Ira Katznelson, //Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of Our Time// (New York: Liveright, 2013).

13. David Halberstam, //The Best and the Brightest// (New York: Random House, 1972).

14. Rick Perlstein, //Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America// (New York: Scribner, 2008).

15. James T. Patterson, //Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945-1974// (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996).