Democratic Party (United States)

==== 1960s–1980s and the collapse of the New Deal coalition ====
{{see also|Civil Rights Movement}}
Issues facing parties and the United States after World War II included the [[Cold War]] and the [[civil rights movement]]. Republicans attracted conservatives and, after the 1960s, white Southerners from the Democratic coalition with their use of the [[Southern strategy]] and resistance to New Deal and [[Great Society]] liberalism. Until the 1950s, African Americans had traditionally supported the Republican Party because of its anti-slavery civil rights policies. Following the passage of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] and [[Voting Rights Act of 1965]], the Southern states became more reliably Republican in presidential politics, while Northeastern states became more reliably Democratic.<ref name="Regional Variations in the Realignment of American Politics, 1944–2004">{{cite journal|last1=Bullock|first1=Charles S.|last2=Hoffman|first2=Donna R.|last3=Gaddie|first3=Ronald Keith|date=2006|title=Regional Variations in the Realignment of American Politics, 1944–2004|journal=Social Science Quarterly|volume=87|issue=3|pages=494–518|doi=10.1111/j.1540-6237.2006.00393.x|issn=0038-4941|quote=The events of 1964 laid open the divisions between the South and national Democrats and elicited distinctly different voter behavior in the two regions. The agitation for civil rights by southern blacks continued white violence toward the civil rights movement, and President Lyndon Johnson's aggressive leadership all facilitated passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. ... In the South, 1964 should be associated with GOP growth while in the Northeast this election contributed to the eradication of Republicans.}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last=Stanley|first=Harold W.|date=1988|title=Southern Partisan Changes: Dealignment, Realignment or Both?|journal=The Journal of Politics|volume=50|issue=1|pages=64–88|doi=10.2307/2131041|issn=0022-3816|quote=Events surrounding the presidential election of 1964 marked a watershed in terms of the parties and the South (Pomper, 1972). The Solid South was built around the identification of the Democratic party with the cause of white supremacy. Events before 1964 gave white southerners pause about the linkage between the Democratic Party and white supremacy, but the 1964 election, passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 altered in the minds of most the positions of the national parties on racial issues.|jstor=2131041|s2cid=154860857}}</ref><ref>{{cite book|url=http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012486|title=The Rise of Southern Republicans |first1= Earl|last1= Black|first2= Merle |last2= Black|date=September 30, 2003 |publisher=Harvard University Press|isbn=9780674012486 |access-date=June 9, 2018|quote=When the Republican party nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater—one of the few senators who had opposed the Civil Rights Act—as their presidential candidate in 1964, the party attracted many southern whites but permanently alienated African-American voters. Beginning with the Goldwater-versus-Johnson campaign more southern whites voted Republican than Democratic, a pattern that has recurred in every subsequent presidential election. ... Before the 1964 presidential election the Republican party had not carried any Deep South state for eighty-eight years. Yet shortly after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, hundreds of Deep South counties gave Barry Goldwater landslide majorities.|archive-date=June 12, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180612135934/http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012486|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last1=Miller|first1=Gary|last2=Schofield|first2=Norman|year=2003|title=Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States|journal=American Political Science Review|volume=97|issue=2|pages=245–60|doi=10.1017/S0003055403000650|s2cid=12885628|issn=1537-5943|quote=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 the 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.}}</ref> Studies show that Southern whites, which were a core constituency in the Democratic Party, shifted to the Republican Party due to [[White backlash|racial backlash]] and [[social conservatism]].<ref name="Issue Evolution">{{cite book|url=https://press.princeton.edu/titles/4385.html|title=Issue Evolution|date=September 6, 1990|publisher=Princeton University Press|isbn=9780691023311|access-date=June 9, 2018|archive-date=May 16, 2018|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180516081536/https://press.princeton.edu/titles/4385.html|url-status=live}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last1=Valentino|first1=Nicholas A.|last2=Sears|first2=David O.|author-link2=David O. Sears|year=2005|title=Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South|journal=American Journal of Political Science|volume=49|issue=3|pages=672–88|doi=10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00136.x|issn=0092-5853|author-link1=Nicholas Valentino}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|first1=Ilyana|last1=Kuziemko|first2=Ebonya|last2=Washington|title=Why Did the Democrats Lose the South? Bringing New Data to an Old Debate|journal=American Economic Review|year=2018|volume=108|issue=10|pages=2830–2867|doi=10.1257/aer.20161413|issn=0002-8282|doi-access=free}}</ref>

{{multiple image
| total_width   = 300
| caption_align = center
| image1        = John F. Kennedy, White House color photo portrait.jpg
| caption1      = [[John F. Kennedy]], the 35th president (1961–1963)
| image2        = 37 Lyndon Johnson 3x4.jpg
| caption2      = [[Lyndon B. Johnson]], the 36th president (1963–1969)
}}
The election of President [[John F. Kennedy]] from Massachusetts in 1960 partially reflected this shift. In the campaign, Kennedy attracted a new generation of younger voters. In his agenda dubbed the [[New Frontier]], Kennedy introduced a host of social programs and public works projects, along with enhanced support of the [[NASA|space program]], proposing a crewed spacecraft [[Apollo 11|trip to the moon]] by the end of the decade. He pushed for civil rights initiatives and proposed the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]], but with his [[Assassination of John F. Kennedy|assassination]] in November 1963, he was not able to see its passage.<ref>James T. Patterson, ''Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974'' (1997).</ref>

Kennedy's successor [[Lyndon B. Johnson]] was able to persuade the largely conservative Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and with a more progressive Congress in 1965 passed much of the [[Great Society]], including [[Medicare (United States)|Medicare]], which consisted of an array of social programs designed to help the poor, sick, and elderly. 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. Many conservative [[Southern Democrats]] defected to the [[Republican Party (United States)|Republican Party]], beginning with the passage of the [[Civil Rights Act of 1964]] and the general leftward shift of the party.<ref>{{cite journal|last1=Miller|first1=Gary|last2=Schofield|first2=Norman|year=2008|title=The Transformation of the Republican and Democratic Party Coalitions in the U.S.|journal=Perspectives on Politics|volume=6|issue=3|pages=433–450|doi=10.1017/S1537592708081218|s2cid=145321253|issn=1541-0986|quote=1964 was the last presidential election in which the Democrats earned more than 50 percent of the white vote in the United States.}}</ref><ref>{{cite web|url=http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012486|title=The Rise of Southern Republicans|last1=Black|first1=Earl|last2=Black|first2=Merle|date=2003|publisher=Harvard University Press|url-status=live|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20180612135934/http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674012486|archive-date=June 12, 2018|access-date=June 9, 2018|quote=When the Republican party nominated Arizona Senator Barry Goldwater—one of the few northern senators who had opposed the Civil Rights Act—as their presidential candidate in 1964, the party attracted many racist southern whites but permanently alienated African-American voters. Beginning with the Goldwater-versus-Johnson campaign more southern whites voted Republican than Democratic, a pattern that has recurred in every subsequent presidential election. ... Before the 1964 presidential election the Republican party had not carried any Deep South state for eighty-eight years. Yet shortly after Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, hundreds of Deep South counties gave Barry Goldwater landslide majorities.}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last1=Miller|first1=Gary|last2=Schofield|first2=Norman|year=2003|title=Activists and Partisan Realignment in the United States|journal=American Political Science Review|volume=97|issue=2|pages=245–260|doi=10.1017/S0003055403000650|s2cid=12885628|issn=1537-5943|quote=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.}}</ref><ref>{{cite journal|last1=Valentino|first1=Nicholas A.|last2=Sears|first2=David O.|author-link2=David O. Sears|year=2005|title=Old Times There Are Not Forgotten: Race and Partisan Realignment in the Contemporary South|journal=American Journal of Political Science|volume=49|issue=3|pages=672–688|doi=10.1111/j.1540-5907.2005.00136.x|issn=0092-5853|author-link1=Nicholas Valentino}}</ref>

The United States' involvement in the [[Vietnam War]] in the 1960s was another divisive issue that further fractured the fault lines of the Democrats' coalition. After the [[Gulf of Tonkin Resolution]] in 1964, President Johnson committed a large contingency of combat troops to Vietnam, but the escalation failed to drive the [[Viet Cong]] from South Vietnam, resulting in an increasing [[Quagmire theory|quagmire]], which by 1968 had become the subject of widespread anti-war protests in the United States and elsewhere. With increasing casualties and nightly news reports bringing home troubling images from Vietnam, the costly military engagement became increasingly unpopular, alienating many of the kinds of young voters that the Democrats had attracted in the early 1960s. The protests that year along with assassinations of [[Martin Luther King Jr.]] and Democratic presidential candidate Senator [[Robert F. Kennedy]] (younger brother of John F. Kennedy) climaxed in turbulence at the hotly-contested [[1968 Democratic National Convention|Democratic National Convention]] that summer in Chicago (which amongst the ensuing turmoil inside and outside of the convention hall nominated Vice President [[Hubert Humphrey]]) in a series of events that proved to mark a significant turning point in the decline of the Democratic Party's broad coalition.<ref>Patterson, ''Grand Expectations: The United States, 1945–1974'' (1997).</ref>

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 [[1972 United States presidential election|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. During Nixon's second term, his presidency was rocked by the [[Watergate]] scandal, which forced him to resign in 1974. He was succeeded by vice president [[Gerald Ford]], who served a brief tenure.

Watergate offered the Democrats an opportunity to recoup, and their nominee [[Jimmy Carter]] won the 1976 presidential election. With the initial support of [[evangelical]] Christian voters in the South, Carter was temporarily able to reunite the disparate factions within the party, but inflation and the [[Iran Hostage Crisis]] of 1979–1980 took their toll, resulting in a [[1980 United States presidential election|landslide]] victory for Republican presidential nominee [[Ronald Reagan]] in 1980, which shifted the political landscape in favor of the Republicans for years to come. The influx of conservative Democrats into the Republican Party is often cited as a reason for the Republican Party's shift further to the right during the late 20th century as well as the shift of its base from the Northeast and Midwest to the South.<ref>{{Cite journal |last1=Smyth |first1=David J. |last2=Taylor |first2=Susan Washburn |date=1992 |title=Why Do the Republicans Win the White House More Often than the Democrats? |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/27550992 |journal=Presidential Studies Quarterly |volume=22 |issue=3 |pages=481–491 |jstor=27550992 |issn=0360-4918 |access-date=January 19, 2023 |archive-date=January 19, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230119034446/https://www.jstor.org/stable/27550992 |url-status=live }}</ref><ref>{{Cite news |last=Jr |first=R. W. Apple |date=July 12, 1992 |title=Donkey's Years; Is There Room At the Top For Democrats? |language=en-US |work=The New York Times |url=https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/12/weekinreview/donkey-s-years-is-there-room-at-the-top-for-democrats.html |access-date=January 19, 2023 |issn=0362-4331 |archive-date=January 19, 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20230119034446/https://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/12/weekinreview/donkey-s-years-is-there-room-at-the-top-for-democrats.html |url-status=live }}</ref>