Chapter 2
In Federalist 10, written in 1787 to convince the citizens of New York to ratify the new federal Constitution, James Madison, credited most often with proposing the principal outline of the Constitution, warned his readers of the evils of factions “adverse to the rights of other citizens and to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community.” In his farewell address to the nation, delivered on leaving the presidency, George Washington warned “in the most solemn manner against the baneful effects of the spirit of party.”
Yet it was Madison who urged Thomas Jefferson to join in organizing against the policies of Alexander Hamilton, Washington’s Secretary of the Treasury, the reputed author of the farewell address. How ironic that these founders of the nation who feared factions, who argued against political parties, became the leaders of the first parties. The Jeffersonian Democratic-Republicans were really the first modern political party.
The institution that the founders feared had not really been developed at the time of their warnings. But parties—and a two-party system—did develop early in American history and have persisted since. There are historical reasons for the two-party system and for the development of the institution of party.
3. John Adams, Gouverneur Morris, Alexander Hamilton, and Thomas Jefferson, political leaders of the early American republic, were among the founders of the nation’s first political parties.
The first American political parties
Madison and Jefferson joined together to organize a political party not because they sought power for themselves but because they believed that Hamilton was leading the country in the wrong direction. Hamilton’s economic policies favored the mercantile interests of New England; Madison and Jefferson viewed the nation as rural, exemplified by those living on Virginia plantations and the farmers on the western frontier. Each camp felt that it defined the public good.
And therein was the debate. The parties that they formed were the parties of eighteenth-century Anglo-Irish philosopher-politician Edmund Burke (“a body of men united, for promoting by their joint endeavors the national interest”). The founding generation, as theorists, feared factions and the division in the nation that factions implied. The founding generation, later as those attempting to govern, found that parties were necessary to form the coalitions required to further their views of the common good.
Alexander Hamilton believed that a strong central government was necessary for the new nation to survive, both economically and geopolitically. As Treasury secretary in the nation’s first years, he had the ear of President Washington, particularly on the critical issues of fully funding the debt incurred during the Revolutionary War and the federal government assuming the debts that the various states incurred. John Adams, Washington’s vice president and eventual successor, agreed with many of Hamilton’s views, even though he despised him personally. Thomas Jefferson, Washington’s Secretary of State, strongly opposed Hamilton’s program but remained in the cabinet out of loyalty to Washington. In Congress, however, the division between followers of Hamilton’s ideas and those of Jefferson’s concept of a more rural, state-centered nation became apparent. The partisan divide grew out of philosophical differences concerning the direction the nation should take.
The dichotomy between the party of Washington, Adams, and Hamilton, known as the Federalists, and the party of Jefferson and Madison, the Democratic-Republicans, became permanent during the debate over adoption of the pro-British Jay Treaty. Jefferson, a Francophile, opposed it. He resigned his cabinet post and returned to Monticello, his Virginia home, but not for long.
Washington announced that he would not seek a third term in 1796. John Adams, as vice president, sought to succeed him, intent on following through with Hamilton’s program, without the presence of Hamilton himself. Congressional opponents of Hamilton’s views organized a campaign for Jefferson by writing to their constituents for support. Adams narrowly beat Jefferson in the election, by three electoral votes; Jefferson conceded to Adams and agreed to serve as his vice president, as specified by the electoral process at that point, an important step in nation building as he acknowledged the legitimacy of the electoral system. This party system was policy centered and formed at the seat of the national government, spreading to the far reaches of the nation.
Adams proved to be an unpopular leader, and Jefferson opposed him again in 1800. The party system was mature enough by that time that all of the electors favoring Jefferson also cast their second vote for his choice of running mate, Aaron Burr—and they tied for the presidency, each polling eight more electoral votes than Adams. Under the constitutional provisions in place then, because no candidate had received a majority of the electoral votes, the election was thrown into the Federalist-controlled House of Representatives to decide among the top three finishers, and the country was in crisis, rife with rumors of clandestine deals to keep the presidency from Jefferson. Jefferson was eventually elected, after thirty-five inconclusive ballots in the House. Because the winner of the election was not denied his prize, the legitimacy of the electoral process was established.
The contributions of these early years to nation building are truly astounding, and the parties, reviled by the founders before they came to power, played a major role. First, a popular president, who could easily have been re-elected for as many terms as he wanted, voluntarily relinquished power in 1796. Then, after the election to succeed him, a candidate who opposed the policies of the president and was narrowly defeated agreed to serve as vice president, because that was the constitutional stipulation in place at the time. Third, a party system formed through which national leaders were able to take their policy differences to the electorate, for the voters to decide. Of course, the electorate was miniscule in those days—and restricted to White males and, in many states, property owners.
4. The heated political rivalry between Aaron Burr and Alexander Hamilton ended in a duel at Weehawken, New Jersey, on July 11, 1804.
Fourth, in 1800 the incumbent president lost the election and eventually conceded, though it would have been possible for him to stay in power through manipulating the House of Representatives. When Adams voluntarily turned over the power of the presidency to Jefferson, the legitimacy of the new nation’s political system was ensured, and the role that parties were to play in that system demonstrated a primacy without precedent.
Soon after the election of 1800, the Federalists became little more than a New England sectional party. Their policies were too conservative to appeal to the nation, and their leaders made little effort to compromise in order to gain popularity. Anglophiles to the end, they opposed Congress’s declaration of war against Britain in 1812. By 1820 the Democratic-Republicans were without major challengers.
The first party period in American history ended with the disappearance of the Federalists. In the early twenty-first century Americans would be amazed if a major party were to vanish, but remember, these were fragile and immature parties. Citizens had not had time to develop loyalty to a party as an institution—their loyalty was to the leaders. The political elite were not divided on every issue. It was Jefferson, in his first inaugural address, who said, “Every difference of opinion is not a difference of principle….We are all Republicans, we are all Federalists.” Legislators’ loyalties were more to region than to party. Jefferson as president used to hold carefully orchestrated dinner parties in order to cajole congressmen to support his views. When Federalist leaders failed to respond to popular dissatisfaction with their views, there was no ingrained party organization to uphold the party. The leaders retired back to their homes, and the party disappeared.
The development of modern parties
The development of modern political parties over the past 200 years can be viewed from different analytical frameworks. Each adds to our understanding of the role that party plays in American politics today.
Parties as a reflection of policy divisions among the electorate
The ideological and policy split between the Federalists and the Democratic-Republicans defined partisanship during the early years of the American republic. When the Federalists disappeared as a threat to win a national election, that division also disappeared. During the “era of good feelings” following the demise of the Federalists, electoral competition was found within the Democratic-Republicans.
All four candidates who ran in the election of 1824—John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, William H. Crawford, and Andrew Jackson—were Democratic-Republicans; the party did not choose one nominee. The story of that election is a fascinating one, too complex to relate here. Suffice it to say that Andrew Jackson won the most popular votes and the most electoral votes in the election, but he did not receive a majority of the electoral votes, so the election was thrown to the House of Representatives. There, Speaker of the House Henry Clay, who had finished fourth in the Electoral College voting and thus had been eliminated, threw his support to John Quincy Adams, who was elected as the sixth president. Adams then named Clay as his Secretary of State, raising claims from the Jackson camp of a corrupt bargain.
Party labels and loyalties remained volatile during this period. In 1828, Jackson, running as a Democratic-Republican, challenged President Adams, the candidate of the National Republicans, and easily defeated him. The election was based on personality more than issues. And with victory, the Jackson party, soon to be known simply as the Democrats, garnered the spoils of victory, claiming all government patronage jobs for their own and throwing out supporters of Adams.
However, the burning issue of slavery, as exemplified by the Missouri Compromise, was emerging beneath this politics of personality and patronage. Party politics in this era can be understood by how the political elite responded to the slavery question. The Whig Party replaced the National Republicans as the main opposition to the Democrats from 1836 through 1852, but both parties equivocated on the issue of slavery. Third parties, first the Liberty Party and then the Free-Soil Party, emerged as alternatives to the major parties, facing up to the most important issue of the day. In 1854, the Republican Party was formed as a major alternative to the Democrats, confronting them on the issue of slavery. By 1856 the Whigs had all but disappeared, with former president Millard Fillmore receiving only eight electoral votes as their standard-bearer, losing to Democrat James Buchanan and the first Republican candidate for president, James C. Fremont. In 1860, Abraham Lincoln won the presidency as a Republican, defeating a Democratic Party that was split between its northern and southern camps.
The Missouri Compromise
The nation—and thus the Senate—was divided equally between free states and slave states, with the abolition movement starting to gain momentum in the North. When the Missouri Territory applied for statehood, northerners first insisted on a clause barring the importation of slaves to the new state. This clause was rejected in the Senate in a debate that foreshadowed the bitterness that was to characterize the debate on slavery for decades to come. The Missouri Compromise of 1820 ended the nation’s first crisis on the slavery issue, admitting Maine as a free state at the same time that Missouri was admitted with slaves, but the issue of slavery dominated politics for the next four decades.
The Democrats and the Republicans have dominated American electoral politics as the two major parties since that time. No other party’s candidate has won the presidency; no other party’s followers have gained majority status in Congress. But that is not to say that party politics has remained dormant for 150 years. The issues that have divided the parties and the compositions of their electoral coalitions have changed again and again.
For decades after the Civil War, and particularly after the end of Reconstruction in 1876, when the Democrats made serious inroads into the South because of lingering resentment toward the party of Lincoln, national partisan battles were closely fought. In a time of rapid industrialization in the nation, the leaders of industry dominated both parties. They backed candidates, many of them generals from the Civil War, who would support their programs of economic advancement. Immigrants flooded the nation’s shores and supported the party that was in power in the urban centers to which they moved, because that party, tied to the area’s industrialists, would guarantee jobs and security. As the nation grew into an industrial power, policy debates took a backseat to power politics.
A series of seemingly unrelated events prevented the Republicans from total domination during this period. First, scandals and an economic depression rocked the administration of Ulysses S. Grant (1869–77), held down Republican support, and helped Democratic candidates in 1876 and 1880. A decline in agricultural production in 1884 and a depression in the early 1890s contributed to Democrat Grover Cleveland’s two nonsuccessive elections in 1884 and 1892. And dissatisfaction by Midwest farmers, evident throughout the 1880s, and later by farmers in the South and the West, gave the Democrats an issue on which to stand. The Populists, carrying the banner of agricultural America as a third party, played much the same role as had the abolitionists half a century earlier.
The election of 1896 stands as a clear dividing point. The Democrats had suffered huge losses in the midterm election of 1894, as a reaction to the depression of 1893 during Cleveland’s second term. The standard-bearer for the Democrats, the charismatic William Jennings Bryan, attacked big business and took up the cause of rural America, calling for easier credit and adoption of a silver standard. No one would deny the power of Bryan’s rhetoric, but he defined for his party a losing coalition.
The great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.…You shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.
William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech, Democratic National Convention, July 1896
The 1896 election realigned the electorate. The Republicans became the party of the cities, of workers and industrialists; the Democrats remained dominant in the South and in border states, but were still a minority party. The only two presidential elections that the Republicans lost over the next nine were those won by Woodrow Wilson: in 1912, because the third-party candidacy of former president Theodore Roosevelt split the Republican Party, and in 1916, when Wilson barely won re-election. Republican control of Congress followed the pattern of presidential voting, as few in the electorate split their tickets at that time.
The Great Depression of 1929 and the two parties’ responses to that crisis shattered the electoral coalitions that remained stable through the first quarter of the twentieth century. Once again, the party labels, the Democrats and the Republicans, remained the same, but many former Republicans became ardent Democrats and many of those who had felt equally strongly about the Democratic Party switched to become Republicans. Republican Herbert Hoover, president during the onset of the Depression, argued for staying the course. His Democratic challenger in 1932, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt, argued for change during the campaign and chose a different course once in office.
Roosevelt’s advisors followed Keynesian economic doctrine and advocated policies that emphasized government intervention in the economy and deficit spending to stimulate economic growth—a New Deal for America. The government became the employer of last resort, the provider for those who were without the necessities of life, the benevolent force in the lives of those in need. Economists can debate whether Roosevelt’s policies pulled the nation out of the Depression—or whether the economic stimulus necessitated by the lead-up to World War II had that effect—but none can deny that the public perception of his policies changed electoral politics for decades to come.
The Democrats maintained their dominance in the South largely for cultural reasons derived from the Civil War. But Roosevelt’s New Deal coalition added the support of labor union members and of small farmers, of minorities and of ethnic Americans, of the poor and of those fighting for equal rights. The Republicans became the party of big business and the affluent. Roosevelt led the nation into World War II, and he gained popularity as the wartime leader. He broke the precedent set by George Washington that presidents should serve only two terms, winning a third term in 1940 and a fourth in 1944, before dying in office in April 1945. The Democrats controlled the Congress during his tenure in office and, with one minor exception, maintained that control into the last decade of the century.
The New Deal coalition dominated American politics into the 1960s; it was not shattered by one cataclysmic event, but rather was broken gradually as different issues confronted the electorate and citizens’ memories of the events that led to their own or their parents’ party loyalties dimmed. In the 1960s, Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater made the first inroads into Democratic dominance in the South. Richard Nixon followed a southern strategy of appealing to voters whose loyalty to the Democratic Party was based more on tradition than on policy preferences. Since that time, the South has moved more and more toward the Republicans, not only for presidential elections but also for state and local offices.
The Vietnam War also brought traditional party loyalties into question. Much of the opposition to that war came from Democrats; many traditional blue-collar Democrats felt that opposing a war while troops were in harm’s way was unpatriotic; they moved to the Republican Party in protest. Others left the Democrats because they felt the party had become isolationist, not willing to stand up to the rest of the world.
On domestic issues the Democrats came to be associated with what some viewed as extreme social positions. During the 1972 presidential campaign, Republicans dubbed the Democrats the party of “amnesty [for draft evaders], acid, and abortion.” The allegiance of more socially conservative Democrats was tested. The presidency of Ronald Reagan stretched traditional loyalties further. Reagan was a charismatic leader with a clearly stated philosophy. He favored a strong defense and lower taxes, cutting welfare programs and supporting traditional social values. Leaders of more conservative, but traditionally Democratic unions joined his supporters. Reagan Democrats, traditional Democrats who voted for President Reagan and the Republicans in the 1980s, were an important part of his winning coalition; many remained in the party after Reagan left office.
As the twentieth century drew to a close, the rise of conservative Christians as a political force further complicated analysis of political coalitions. Many conservative Christians who should have favored the Democrats for economic reasons voted Republican. Partisan politics became increasingly bitter, with compromise positions to solve pressing national problems difficult to forge. The partisan balance, as exemplified by the closeness of the Bush–Gore presidential election in 2000 and the party divisions in each house of Congress, was precarious. The parties’ opposing stands on some of the issues were clear. However, partisan division on other policy issues was less clear. Social issues divided the electorate in one way, economic issues in another, and international issues in perhaps a third. Politicians, seeing this, emphasized extreme positions on wedge issues that further divided the country. The Republican Party had particular difficulty because many economic conservatives were uncomfortable with the extremely conservative social stands taken by some seeking to carry the party banner.
5. Ronald Reagan accepts the presidential nomination at the Republican National Convention in Dallas, Texas, on August 23, 1984. Describing a partisan view of the differences between the Republicans and Democrats, he said, “The choices this year are …between two fundamentally different ways of governing—their government of pessimism, fear, and limits, or ours of hope, confidence, and growth.”
However, by the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, partisan lines were clearly drawn. The Republicans were the conservative party on all issues, domestic and international. When Donald Trump ran for the presidency and during his term in office, he demanded and received fealty from all running on the party label, loyalty both to his policy positions and to him personally. Democrats stood on many of their traditional positions—commitment to an active role for the United States as leader of the Western world, firmly supportive of rights of minorities and the poor, and concerned about the environment. When Joe Biden won the presidency in 2020, he ran on these issues, not as an extreme liberal but as a moderate, convinced that he could work with Republicans to find solutions to the nation’s problems and that he could end the divisiveness that characterized the Trump years.
This review makes clear that at various times in American history the division between the parties has directly reflected a policy divide in the nation; at other times this correlation has been less clear. As the national government has become involved in more areas of citizens’ lives, and as those lives themselves have become increasingly complex and more involved in a global community, the extent to which partisan differences can reflect the often subtle and internally conflicted citizens’ views on the issues becomes more difficult.
In the early years, the parties were instruments of political leaders seeking a following in the country. But they evolved into institutions that play a major role in the electoral process, without which American politics is unimaginable. Another important part of party history, then, is a story of institutional development.
American political parties as institutions
The development of parties as institutions begins in earnest with the democratizing reforms of the Jacksonian period (1829–37). Popular participation in the electoral process was the centerpiece of Jacksonian democracy, drawing the lesson from John Quincy Adams winning the White House after losing the popular vote. Rejecting the old method of nomination by congressional caucus, caricatured as King Caucus, prior to the 1832 election, parties began to hold conventions, with delegates coming from around the nation to select presidential candidates. By the 1830s the norm was for states to choose presidential electors by popular elections, not by balloting within the state legislature. In order to connect representatives in Washington to their constituents, states moved to district, rather than at-large, elections of US representatives, a practice written into law in the Census Act of 1840. Governors, whom state legislatures had often selected in the early days, came to be popularly elected, and citizens were asked to vote on many state and local officials.
As a result, political parties began to organize at the local level in order to fill ballot slots, support candidates, and get out the vote. By the 1840s both parties had complex, decentralized organizations. In 1848 the Democrats formed a national committee (and the Republicans followed suit less than a decade later); the national committees, however, were clearly less powerful than their state and local counterparts. Nonetheless, by mid-century, formal organizations from the local to the national level were in place in both major political parties, and they have remained so since.
As the franchise spread to a larger portion of the citizenry, the parties adopted campaign techniques to reach the voters. Candidates were often old generals who recalled their military exploits with catchy slogans—Jackson himself, the hero of the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, was “Old Hickory”; “Tippecanoe and Tyler Too” were William Henry Harrison, the victor of the Battle of Tippecanoe against a group of American Indians, and his running mate, John Tyler; “Old Rough and Ready” was war hero Zachary Taylor, elected president in 1848.
Politicians learned to use inflammatory rhetoric to excite the voters; parties ran torchlight parades to stoke the competitive fires of their followers. Getting out the vote meant getting the common man to the polls, and then, as now, the average voter was not stirred by philosophical debates; the spoils system, with the spoils in terms of post-election employment going to supporters of the winning candidate, and the excitement of campaign events were the stuff of politics at mid-century.
The latter half of the nineteenth century is known as the “gilded age of parties.” Party competition was incredibly intense. As a result, parties put a premium on organizing to get their supporters to the polls, particularly in marginal districts; they had to be disciplined, organized, and energetic.
Party machines, structured hierarchies dominated by political bosses, with workers organized down to the most local level, the voting precinct, came into existence during this period. Material incentives, tangible rewards that were given when elections were won and, by implication, would be removed if the elections were lost, cemented the loyalty of party workers and voters to the machine. Party workers often held lucrative patronage jobs—and they worked hard for the machine to keep those jobs. An important part of their task was to recruit new loyalists, and new immigrants were tempting targets. The party in power provided new citizens with all forms of aid—jobs, lodging, the extra treats at Thanksgiving and Christmas, and, perhaps most important to new arrivals, socialization into their new community. In return, the machine received votes—and loyalty.
The party machines that dominated urban areas at the end of the nineteenth century were parties of patronage, not principle. Their job was to win elections; they recruited candidates for local office, but they cared more about the jobs those officials could hand out than the policies they passed. Local or county government officials personally controlled most patronage jobs.
At the state level, party machines, particularly Republican Party machines, were run differently. In those cases the fuel was money, provided by business interests, more than jobs and aid for new voters. US senators often ran state machines, because at this time US senators were chosen by state legislatures. The business interests supported the boss, who was elected by the state legislature and went to Washington to protect the interests of those who supported his organization. The fuel that ran the machine was different, but the material nature of the incentives for loyalty was the same.
One important mechanism of party control was control over the nominating process. Party bosses decided who the nominees would be. They then printed and distributed the ballots, so that they controlled the fate of those nominees. The workings of the parties were out of sight and well beyond the control of the average citizen.
Party machines reached their peak at the turn of the century. Their decline began with reforms of the early twentieth century and proceeded, at different paces in different areas but inevitably, from then on. The invention and then spread of the direct primary election took control of nominations out of the hands of party leaders. The civil service system removed many patronage jobs from party control. The Seventeenth Amendment to the US Constitution, passed in 1913, required direct election of US senators, taking one of the last powers away from state party machines. Welfare reforms passed as part of the New Deal in response to the Great Depression meant that the federal government, not the parties, was the source of aid for needy citizens—and loyalty was transferred accordingly. While vestiges of party machines could be found in certain urban centers well past mid-century, Mayor Richard J. Daley’s Cook County machine in Chicago standing as a prime example, those last dominating party organizations were the exception, not the rule.
6. President Lyndon Johnson (right) pays homage to Chicago’s longtime political boss, Mayor Richard Daley.
Parties, however, did not disappear. If parties as campaign organizations were on the wane, parties as a means to organize the government and as a symbol to which citizens showed loyalty remained strong. In the early twentieth century both parties, in both houses of Congress, began to elect formal leaders, whether the party held majority or minority status. Party members in legislatures were expected to follow their leaders. The party of the president supported that president’s legislative program. Newly elected presidents routinely chose members of their own party to fill cabinet and subcabinet jobs.
Voters might have lost material incentives to support one party or the other, but their loyalty remained. The partisan division during the New Deal was extremely deep. Loyal Democrats viewed President Roosevelt as a savior; to the Republicans, he was a demon. Voter loyalty to party transcended issue and, except in the case of charismatic leaders like General Dwight D. Eisenhower, when he ran for president in 1952, personality. Party organizations remained in existence, but their power was gone.
However, to paraphrase Mark Twain, rumors of the death of political parties have been greatly exaggerated. The two-party system has not died, and in fact the Democratic and Republican Parties persist and continue to dominate. In the early eighteenth century, the Federalists disappeared and two-party competition ended for a while, but that did not happen in the mid-twentieth century, because each party then existed as an organization, and organizations adapt to maintain their existence; they do not fold up their tents and sulk away.
The adaptation by political parties involved responding to a situation in which the campaign tools they used were no longer as relevant, in which loyalty was not to the organization per se, in which ticket splitting (voting for Democrats for some offices and Republicans for others) became routine, and in which candidates ran campaigns on their own, not in lockstep with other members of their parties. Put simply, parties adapted to a new situation by taking on a role that candidates needed to have filled. For new campaign technologies—first radio, then television, then ever more sophisticated use of computers for polling and direct voter contact—campaigns needed money. Parties took on the role of raising money for candidates. They did this at the national level, through the national committees and the four separate committees charged with overseeing congressional and senatorial campaigns, to so-called Hill committees (the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the National Republican Congressional Committee, and the National Republican Senatorial Committee); they passed money from the national level down to the state levels; they provided services, such as polling and opposition research, for candidates who could not afford them. They served as a go-between, easing contact for candidates in their party with representatives of interest groups likely to support them and with wealthy individual donors. The parties have essentially become service organizations for their candidates for office, but in that role they play a very important part in national campaigns.
The political historian Joel Silbey divides the history of American parties into four eras, according to how central the role of parties has been to American life. The early period, up to the Jackson presidency, is described as a preparty period. The period from then through the gilded age of parties is called the party period. The period in which party’s role is seen to be declining is a postparty period; the current era is characterized as a nonparty period. Perhaps that is so, in terms of the centrality of party to American life, but parties—particularly as campaign organizations and as means to organize the government—remain vibrant and active today. They do not play the role they once did, but they have adapted and found a new role. If one does not understand that role, one cannot understand modern American elections.
The system in which American political parties function
To this point we have discussed how the American parties have reflected policy divisions within the electorate and the development and adaptation of parties as political institutions. But institutions exist—and policy is developed—within a broader political system. Changes in that system lead inevitably to changes in the functioning of institutions and just as inevitably to alterations in the policy arena. We will briefly consider three areas in which important changes have taken place—the electorate, what offices are contested under what rules, and what techniques are used to contest elections—looking in each case at the implications for political parties and the electoral process.
Expansion of the electorate
At the time of the founding, in most states voting was the exclusive prerogative of White, male property owners. Today, universal suffrage is the rule, with debate over how to raise turnout, to convince those eligible to vote to exercise the franchise. The history of expansion of the electorate has progressed in four phases.
The first step was removal of the property-owning requirement, eliminated on a state-by-state basis, usually replaced with a requirement that voters be taxpayers. The taxpayer requirement persisted, in the form of a poll tax (a tax levied as a citizen exercised the right to vote), until it too was eliminated—for federal offices by the Twenty-Fourth Amendment to the Constitution (ratified in 1964) and for all elections by the Supreme Court in the 1966 case of Harper v. Virginia State Board of Elections.
Next came the extension of suffrage to Blacks, a process that took more than a century to complete. After the Civil War, the Fifteenth Amendment, ratified in 1870, stated that no citizen could be denied the right to vote based on “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” However, legislatures in former slaveholding states adopted ingenious means of keeping the newly enfranchised former slaves from voting. The so-called Jim Crow laws included literacy tests, tests on interpreting the Constitution, “Whites only” primaries (which defined the parties as private associations open only to Whites), residency requirements, and poll taxes. Southern communities often placed voting booths far from areas in which former slaves resided and opened them only for limited hours. These legal restrictions were supplemented with illegal means—intimidation and physical abuse.
The result was that in 1960, fewer than 15 percent of the African American citizens living in Alabama, Mississippi, and South Carolina were registered to vote; only about 30 percent of the African Americans living throughout the South were registered in that year. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 addressed the inequality of political rights that resulted from these practices. The act specified that if fewer than 50 percent of a racial minority were registered to vote in any county, this constituted prima facie evidence of discrimination, and federal registrars would replace local officials to guarantee that racial minorities were given equal treatment with regard to voting. The Voting Rights Act was one of the most important products of the civil rights movement of the 1960s. By the decade’s end, the percentage of African Americans registered to vote had more than doubled throughout the region and had grown more than fourfold in the states with the lowest percentage prior to the passage of the act.
The 1965 act also contained a provision that required federal government approval of any change in voting procedure in any state covered under this legislation. In 2013, the Supreme Court eliminated that requirement in Shelby County v. Holder, accepting the argument that the states that had violated the provisions of the law in 1965 should not be considered a different class forever. Since that time, a number of states have passed laws that make voting more difficult. Thus, as African American turnout continues to trail the national average, concern still exists that the legacy of discrimination remains.
The third stage in the expansion of the franchise was extending the vote to women. The epic battles waged by women suffragists, from the Declaration of Sentiments regarding women’s rights issued at the Seneca Falls convention in 1848 through ratification in 1920 of the woman suffrage amendment, the Nineteenth Amendment to the Constitution, rightly deserve the volumes dedicated to them. Fighting simultaneously on a state-by-state basis and on the national stage, the suffragists sought to gain an equal share of power, not just from those holding it but also from those with whom they shared a home and bed. That they succeeded is testament to the strength and skill of their leaders, their perseverance, and the triumph of people of principle over people of power. Today, turnout by female voters exceeds that of male voters.
7. A woman suffrage procession makes its way through the streets of Washington, DC, on March 3, 1913. The expansion of the franchise had the potential to double the size of the electorate.
These three stages of expansion of the electorate all made significant differences in the electoral process in the United States. In the early days of the republic, only about one in thirty could vote; politics was an avocation of the elite. There was little need to consider the views of the average man. However, extending the franchise to all taxpayers fundamentally changed the game; as the players changed, those seeking election had to adopt new strategies or, as in the case of the Federalists, disappear.
Strom Thurmond
Strom Thurmond made his career in South Carolina as a race baiter, as a segregationist politician who stood up for the way of life that some southerners yearned for. In 1948 he ran for president as a States’ Rights, pro-segregationist candidate. By the 1980s, however, Thurmond, who became a Republican in the 1960s because Lyndon Johnson was too strong on civil rights, had an African American receptionist in his Senate office. No longer could those in power in the South ignore their African American constituents. In 2015, his son, South Carolina state senator Paul Thurmond, was one of the leaders of the effort to remove the Confederate battle flag from the state capitol grounds, after the murder of nine African Americans attending a Charleston African Methodist Episcopal Church Bible study session.
Extension of the vote to African Americans was a statement of principle in the first place; however, the theoretical right to vote was converted into actual voting power in the 1960s. Especially in the South, large segments of the population, whose views and desires had been safely ignored by elected politicians because those politicians knew that African Americans did not vote, now became relevant.
When women received the right to vote, on a state-by-state basis near the end of the nineteenth century and nationally in 1920, the eligible electorate doubled. Those in power—party leaders, union leaders, the liquor industry, the Catholic Church, business leaders—all opposed women voting, because they feared that the policies on which their power depended would be reversed overnight. That did not happen, but the nature of politics did change, with parties adopting platform planks appealing to women and adapting campaign techniques and strategies accordingly. At various times in the twentieth century women came together on issues of special concern to them; at times they voted significantly differently from their male counterparts. But, by and large, women’s voting behavior did not differ significantly from that of men.
The fourth and last stage in the expansion of the franchise occurred when the voting age was lowered from twenty-one in most states to eighteen. President Eisenhower, who as supreme commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II had sent hundreds of thousands of young men into harm’s way, understood the contradiction inherent in a law that kept those between ages eighteen and twenty-one from voting, although they could be drafted. He asked Congress to lower the voting age to eighteen in his 1955 State of the Union address and insisted that Alaska and Hawaii institute lower voting ages in order to join the Union.
But it was not until 1971, during the Vietnam War, that the issue reached a national crescendo, leading to the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, lowering the minimum voting age to eighteen. While some feared and others hoped that the newly enfranchised youth would vote as a liberal bloc, this prediction has never been realized. Young voters participate at much lower rates than their older peers do; they do not differ significantly in how they vote from older voters with similar racial, social, and economic backgrounds.
Offices contested in American elections
If expansion of the franchise altered participation, changes in the contested offices altered the objective of the electoral process itself. Again, a progression can be noted, and the result has clear implications for the electoral process itself.
The progression is seen in an increase in the number of elections for office put before citizens. One can see the pattern without describing the steps in detail. At the time of the founding, the president, US senators, and most governors were elected with little or no popular participation. The president was elected indirectly, by the Electoral College, and few of the electors were chosen in popular elections; state legislatures chose most governors and all US senators; and many local officials were appointed.
All of that has changed. While the Electoral College still elects the president, electors are now popularly chosen in every state, and there is considerable agitation toward eliminating the Electoral College altogether. All state governors are popularly elected. Since the passage of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913, US senators have been popularly elected. And now citizens elect judges in many states. Local officials continue to be elected in numbers beyond those in any other democracy. While the number of elected officials has increased, the number of political appointees these officials can name to office has decreased radically. As a result, electoral politics is much less about the spoils of office and more about appealing to the electorate in other ways.
Presidents and statewide officeholders portray a public image that appeals to the electorate. That trend began as far back as the mid-nineteenth century, when parties nominated war heroes to whom the electorate could relate. The trend is more obvious in the age of television and mass communications. Would voters choose someone who looked like Lincoln in the modern era? Other officeholders, those in less visible offices, have developed other techniques to reach the voters. Congressmen and state legislators spend a good deal of their own time and that of their staffs on constituent service, looking out for the needs of individuals and communities as they relate to their government. All of these changes have clear and obvious effects on the electoral process.
Campaign techniques
Howard Dean’s unsuccessful campaign for the Democratic nomination in 2004 demonstrates the third systemic change, a change in campaign techniques. He relied on the Internet to reach voters, organize his campaign, and raise money, using technology in ways never tried before, but in a sense his campaign was a precursor of what was to become the latest in a long series using technological innovations in a political context.
One hundred years ago politicians reached citizens on a one-on-one basis. Personal contact was the only possible means of contact, whether by mail or face to face. Politicians did not use radio as a means to communicate or as a campaign technique until the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Since that time we have seen three separate technological revolutions in campaigning. First, candidates now communicate differently with the electorate. Television replaced radio as the principal means of communication with potential voters. Broadcasting over television has been supplemented by “narrowcasting,” buying advertisements on cable outlets that appeal to particular subsets of the population and designing messages accordingly. Internet appeals and social media connections further refine the ways in which candidates communicate their messages to prospective voters and raise funds. President Trump demonstrated how effectively a candidate or an officeholder can communicate directly to a desired audience using Twitter.
Second, candidates find information about the electorate in increasingly sophisticated ways. Computer technology revolutionized the polling industry. Whereas once only national campaigns or the most expensive statewide campaigns could afford public opinion polling, and a benchmark poll at the beginning of a campaign and one or two subsequent polls were considered state-of-the-art research, now national and even statewide campaigns poll continuously. They use rolling samples to gauge changing public views on a day-to-day or event-to-event basis.
Polling is commonplace in many local elections. Whereas once pollsters were told to work their craft, provide their information to campaign strategists, and stand aside, now they are campaign strategists, working closely (often in the same firm) with media consultants, direct mail consultants, fundraisers, and the inner circle of a candidate’s campaign. Information that is gathered is more sophisticated, more timely, and clearly more central to defining campaign messages.
The ubiquity of polls has had some dysfunctional consequences. Pollsters intrude on citizens’ lives so frequently that more and more citizens refuse to respond to requests for information. As a result, pollsters struggle to reach representative samples and to gauge public opinion accurately.
Third, campaigns gather and analyze data with increased sophistication. Faster and cheaper computer technology now allows campaigns to gather, store, and analyze data—on supporters, on volunteers, on donors, on issues, on opponents—in much more sophisticated ways. Fundraising has changed dramatically because campaigns can target appeals with precision. Campaign organizing can be done with increased sophistication, with much of the communication handled instantly over the internet. Campaigns can tailor candidate speeches and debate preparation to audiences, reference government programs more precisely, and counter opponents’ claims more swiftly, all because of computerized data analysis.
Even with these changes, politics remains as much art as science. Recall again the presidential primary campaign of Howard Dean in 2004. Dean, a former governor of the small state of Vermont, harnessed the internet as no candidate had before. He took a technique pioneered four years earlier by Republican John McCain and used the internet to raise vast sums of money; none of the other candidates understood the power of this tool until the Dean campaign demonstrated it. He used internet communications to build a vast army of volunteers, all connected instantaneously with the campaign messages. He targeted the voters to whom he appealed in a precise and sophisticated way. Yet, he lost. He lost, in part to be sure, because he lost his cool one night in Iowa—and the same people who were listening so intently to his message saw a different side of the man they had supported.
He lost more fundamentally because others in the contest understood the game as well—and they applied their art. In 2008, Barack Obama’s campaign applied those lessons—and captured the desire of the nation for change—using the new techniques with its own artful touch. In 2012, the Romney campaign applied the 2008 Obama techniques, but Obama went further and understood voters’ desires better. Campaigns learn techniques and can quickly catch up, but the art of reaching a broad base of the electorate is more difficult to learn.
Political analysts have devoted a huge amount of time and energy to understanding why Donald Trump vanquished a strong field of Republicans contenders for the Grand Old Party (GOP) nomination in 2016 and went on to upset Hillary Clinton, the favorite of virtually every prognosticator in the general election. To be sure, he mastered a new way of reaching his supporters—his Twitter feed allowed him direct access to millions of voters. But he also had a message that appealed to a disaffected part of the electorate, and he communicated that message masterfully, at least in 2016. By 2020 many had heard the message long enough. The country longed for calm and a moderate voice. Thus, despite Trump’s success in reaching his base, he was unable to expand it. And Joe Biden, the oldest man ever elected president, was able to capture the tone the nation wanted and, using old and tested techniques, best the master communicator.
Parties have changed throughout this nation’s history. The parties have changed as institutions; the issues of the day have defined the appeals that they have made to the electorate; the electorate itself has changed, as have the offices that are contested; and the ways in which appeals are made have changed as the technology important to campaigning has advanced.
But at the same time, the electoral process has not changed. It is still about contesting for public support of candidates based on what the voters think those candidates have done and are likely to do in the future. It is still about winners and losers—for in the American system, close does not count. And it is still about organizing, understanding the rules and the voters and how one can appeal to the voters most efficiently under the rules in play.