Democratic Party Of Georgia history

By 1820 the Federalist Party had faded from national politics, leaving the Democratic-Republicans as the country’s sole major party and allowing Monroe to run unopposed in that year’s presidential election.

Jackson, whose strength lay in the South and West, referred to his followers simply as Democrats (or as Jacksonian Democrats). Jackson defeated Adams in the 1828 presidential election.

The issue split the Democrats at their 1860 presidential convention, where Southern Democrats nominated John C. Breckinridge and Northern Democrats nominated Douglas.

Although poll taxes, or voting fees, existed sporadically throughout American history, in 1877 Georgia had been the first state to enact a "poll tax" to effectively disenfranchise many poor black voters.

In the country’s second critical election, in 1896, the Democrats split disastrously over the free-silver and Populist program of their presidential candidate, William Jennings Bryan.

Wilson won in 1912 because the Republican vote was divided between President William Howard Taft (the official party nominee) and former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt, the candidate of the new Bull Moose Party.

The Democrats regained the White House in the election of 1960, when John F. Kennedy narrowly defeated Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard M. Nixon.

Although Johnson defeated Republican Barry M. Goldwater by a landslide in 1964, his national support waned because of bitter opposition to the Vietnam War, and he chose not to run for reelection.

In 1972 the party nominated antiwar candidate George S. McGovern, who lost to Nixon in one of the biggest landslides in United States electoral history.

In 1992 Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton recaptured the White House for the Democrats by defeating Bush and third-party candidate Ross Perot.

In 1994 the Democrats lost control of both houses of Congress, in part because of public disenchantment with Clinton’s health care plan.

In 2004, the Democratic Party lost control of the Georgia House of Representatives, putting the party in the minority for the first time in state history.

In the general election of 2008 the party’s presidential nominee, Barack Obama, defeated Republican John McCain, thereby becoming the first African American to be elected president of the United States.

The Democratic Party fared better in the 2012 general election, with Obama defeating his Republican opponent, Mitt Romney.

In the 2016 presidential race, Democrats selected Hillary Clinton as their nominee, the first time a major party in the United States had a woman at the top of its presidential ticket.