Democratic Party history

In 1854, angry with the Kansas–Nebraska Act, anti-slavery Democrats left the party and joined Northern Whigs to form the Republican Party.

The Democrats split over slavery, with Northern and Southern tickets in the election of 1860, in which the Republican Party gained ascendancy.

Most War Democrats rallied to Republican President Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans' National Union Party in the election of 1864, which featured Andrew Johnson on the Union ticket to attract fellow Democrats.

Since the nomination of William Jennings Bryan in 1896, the party has generally positioned itself to the left of the Republican Party on economic issues.

He failed to secure Senate passage of the Versailles Treaty (ending the war with Germany and joining the League of Nations). The weak party was deeply divided by issues such as the KKK and prohibition in the 1920s.

Franklin D. Roosevelt, elected to the presidency in 1932, came forth with federal government programs called the New Deal.

The election of President John F. Kennedy from Massachusetts in 1960 partially reflected this shift.

Republican presidential nominee Richard Nixon was able to capitalize on the confusion of the Democrats that year, and won the 1968 election to become the 37th president.

He won re-election in a landslide in 1972 against Democratic nominee George McGovern, who like Robert F. Kennedy, reached out to the younger anti-war and counterculture voters, but unlike Kennedy, was not able to appeal to the party's more traditional white working-class constituencies.

Watergate offered the Democrats an opportunity to recoup, and their nominee Jimmy Carter won the 1976 presidential election.

Kennedy and Johnson's advocacy of civil rights further solidified black support for the Democrats but had the effect of alienating Southern whites who would eventually gravitate toward the Republican Party, particularly after the election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency in 1980.

With the ascendancy of the Republicans under Ronald Reagan, the Democrats searched for ways to respond yet were unable to succeed by running traditional candidates, such as former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Walter Mondale, who lost to Reagan in the 1984 presidential election.

Arkansas governor Bill Clinton was one such figure, who was elected president in 1992 as the Democratic nominee.

The economic policy adopted by the Democratic Party, including the former Clinton administration, has been referred to as "Third Way." The Democrats lost control of Congress in the election of 1994 to the Republican Party.

Re-elected in 1996, Clinton was the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to be elected to two terms.

Democrats regained majority control of both the House and the Senate in the 2006 elections.

Barack Obama won the Democratic Party's nomination and was elected as the first African American president in 2008.

In the 2010 midterm elections, the Democratic Party lost control of the House and lost its majority in state legislatures and state governorships.

Based on a poll conducted in 2014, Gallup found that 30% of Americans identified as Democrats, 23% as Republicans, and 45% as independents.