Political Parties - AP US Government

A "marginal district" is a district in which the elected representative carries less than fifty-five percent of the popular vote is said to have won only marginally. The opposite of a marginal district is a "safe seat." Because marginal districts can change hands much more easily, they receive a disproportionate focus during campaign season.

This is a straightforward vocab question. Caucus is the correct answer. Remember: caucuses are relatively active events, where participants will debate, express support, and even sometimes physically move (as in to one side of the room or another) to show which candidate they think is worthy. Caucuses were once the most popular way of picking a presidential nominee, however, states that use the caucus now are in the minority.

Closed primaries– where only those voters who have registered beforehand as party members are permitted to vote – are legally allowed as part of the political process. While many more states choose to host open primaries, which allow any citizen (unregistered included) to partake, closed primaries remain a valuable tool that some parties continue to employ. Party machines, however, with their infamous fondness for dispensing overt patronage to those citizens who demonstrate loyalty but not necessarily ability, have been done away with by a series of new regulations put in place after the turn of the twentieth century. Soft money (funds stored aside by the party leadership to later distribute freely to candidates) has been more recently banned, as part of modern efforts to reduce corrupt party practices.

When the Whig Party collapsed in the 1850s, it was largely attributable to a defection of Southern Whigs to the Democratic Party over the issue of slavery. The remaining anti-slavery Whigs banded together with Northern Democrats who were anti-slavery, as well as a few other smaller political groups, to form a new party, christened the Republican Party, for the 1856 Presidential Election.

In the decades after the Civil War, the Republican Party was the party of liberals and the North, whereas the Democratic Party was dominant in the South. Over the last century, particularly the last thirty years, there has been a shift and reversal of this trend. The Democratic Party is now primarily supported in the Northeast and on the West coast. Whereas the Republican Party has its greatest success in the Deep South.

The Presidential election of 1980 was the election that ushered Ronald Reagan into the White House on the back of a landslide victory over incumbent Jimmy Carter. It witnessed a dramatic shift in the American voting public towards conservatism, which has not really abated in the thirty years since. It showed that the general public had completed its turning away from the New Deal ideology of Roosevelt and the 1930s Democratic Party and now desired lower taxes and less government intervention in the economy, not to mention a much larger military.

The First Party System in American political history witnessed the Federalists, led by Alexander Hamilton, pitted against the Democratic-Republicans. The Federalists favored a strong central government and close ties with Britain, whereas the Democratic-Republicans (usually considered to be led by Thomas Jefferson) favored more power in the hands of the States. The First Party System endured until the end of the War of 1812, when the Federalists refusal to support the war effort effectively looked like cowardice and treason in the face of America’s favorable emergence from the war.

The Second Party System in America evolved during the highly contentious elections of 1824 and 1828. The Jacksonian Democrats, led by Andrew Jackson, were pitted against the Whigs, who were for the most part led by Henry Clay. The Second Party System followed the Era of Good Feelings, in which only the Democratic-Republicans existed as a major party. The Second Party System ended in the 1850s, as the party split heavily over the issue of slavery.

The Republican Party emerged in the 1850s, solidifying in 1854, in opposition to the Kansas-Nebraska Act and the extension of slavery into the territories. By the election of 1858, the Party contained former Whigs, Free-Soilers, and many Northern Democrats, and it carried the majority in every Northern state. It was led by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War.

The election of 1964 is incredibly important, in terms of realignment and the South. Before getting into it, however, we need to examine a decent amount of background information.

Remember: Abraham Lincoln, the first Republican president, comes to be associated with abolition and winning the civil war, among many other things. For some strange reason, he was not popular among Southern whites (hopefully you can see why this is true).

Remember: The South, in the wake of the Civil War and after the end of Reconstruction, aligned with the Democrats. This make sense, if you think about it: Republicans (anti-slavery, civil war victors) and Democrats (fought a war in part based off of slavery, lost the civil war) were natural enemies. Thus, after the end of Reconstruction, southern whites voted exclusively for Democrats—on all levels of government. Southern blacks, then, came to associate the Democratic Party with racial oppression (Jim Crow), as Democrats controlled southern governments and brutally enforced race laws. Many political scientists describe the political atmosphere of the south (during this time) as existing in a vacuum—it stayed basically the same, while Democrats in the rest of the country evolved differently.

We see this difference in a particularly bright light with the policies of FDR during the New Deal. FDR, a Democrat, appeals nearly nationwide and managed to weave incredibly diverse groups together with the New Deal. His liberal policies appealed particularly strongly to northern African Americans (among other groups). Political scientists generally refer to this as one of the first major racial realignments, as northern African Americans realigned (that is, changed party allegiances) to the Democratic Party. Southern African Americans, however, did not realign with the Democratic Party. Remember: southern blacks lived day-to-day under the oppressive politics of Democrats at a STATE level, thus making a realignment (from being Republican) to that party relatively unlikely.

The election of 1964, however, marks the beginning of a massive change. LBJ, a democrat—from Texas no less!—runs on a platform that stresses civil rights. Barry Goldwater, however, a Republican from Arizona, runs on a platform that stresses states’ rights. It’s around this time that southern blacks realize that the Republican Party may no longer be their party of choice, and whites in the Deep South vote for a Republican president.

Party realignment occurs when the dominant party is displaced and ousted from power by the minority party. Such shifts usually happen as the result of what is known as a critical election– a shakeup of an election in which fissures caused by new issues and/or disagreements within the majority party conspire to divide voters, so that some voters end up deserting the party altogether. This desertion weakens the majority party from the inside out and ultimately prevents it from maintaining its governmental dominance. In turn, this allows the minority party to take advantage of the newly-opened power vacuum and thus rise to prominence by in fact becoming the new majority party.

The New Deal coalition emerged during the early years of the Roosevelt administration and would allow the Democratic party to dominate American politics for the next thirty years. It is used to refer to the alignment of seemingly disparate social and interest groups into one reliable voting bloc that would support New Deal policies and the continued expansion of social welfare and government involvement in the well-being of the population. It included the urban working class, Catholics, Jews, white southerners, African Americans, farmers, and intellectuals.

Although James Madison would have been called a "Federalist" during the ratification issue, by the time the first two American political parties (Federalists and Democratic-Republicans) had solidified, he was firmly a Democratic-Republican. George Washington belonged to no political party, although likely he would have leaned more towards the Federalists. The Federalists had died out before Andrew Jackson entered the political arena. The only politician who is correctly matched is Thomas Jefferson. Not only was Jefferson a Democratic-Republican, he formed the party. The Federalist Party was founded and led by Alexander Hamilton.

The Populist Party arose very quickly in the 1880s and early 1890s and disappeared even quicker after the election of 1896. The Party was a coalition of the poor and farmers from the South and the western plains. They primarily wanted to see America come off the gold standardin order to put a stop to the rapid deflation that was affecting the price of agricultural products.

From the beginning of Roosevelt’s government in the 1930s—during The Great Depression—all the way through to the mid 1960s, American politics was dominated by the Democratic Party. This dominance fell apart in the dealignment election of 1968, when much of the Democratic Party’s support base migrated towards the Republicans.

The election of 1860 was the last election before the Civil War, and it demonstrated a stark sectional divide in political preference. Lincoln, and the Republican Party, carried every Free Soil state and won the electoral vote with only thirty-nine percent of the popular vote. This election propelled the Republican Party into a period of national dominance.

The Progressive Party, led by Theodore Roosevelt in the election of 1912, is the third party which has had most success in American political history. Roosevelt carried eight states in the electoral college; however, Roosevelt’s success ended up splitting the Republican support base, ensuring that Wilson, a Democrat, was elected with only forty-two percent of the popular vote.

From the early 1830s through 1856, American politics had been dominated by the Democrats and the Whigs, but in the election of 1856 the Whig Party fell apart, as many of the politicians and its support base migrated and formed the Republican Party.

Eugene Debs was one of the most famous socialists in American history. He ran for Presidency as the candidate of the Socialist Party of America on five separate occasions, once attracting over five percent of the popular vote.