Democratic Party

X

The Reagan Setback

Landslide victories by Republican presidential nominee Ronald Reagan over Carter in 1980 and Walter Mondale in 1984 further wounded the Democrats, but the party rebounded in 1986 to take control of the U.S. Senate, which had been in Republican hands for six years. The Democrats entered the fall 1988 presidential campaign more unified than at any time since 1976 but were unable to overcome the portrayal of their nominee, Michael Dukakis, as “out of the mainstream” on social, economic, and defense issues; Republican George Bush won the election. However, the Democrats did increase their Senate, House, gubernatorial, and state legislative majorities in the 1988 elections.

XI

The Clinton Era

In 1992 the Democratic Party recaptured the presidency after 12 years when Bill Clinton won the election. Clinton and his vice president, Al Gore, pledged to improve the economy, which had been depressed during much of Bush’s presidency. Although Clinton was successful in revitalizing the economy, the Democrats lost their majority in Congress in the 1994 elections.

Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress for the first time in more than 40 years after the 1994 elections. The Democratic president and the Republican Congress often had trouble agreeing on legislation. The Republican Congress passed bills for welfare reform and tax cuts, which President Clinton vetoed. In addition, the federal government had two partial shutdowns when the Republicans and Democrats could not agree on a federal budget for the 1996 fiscal year.

In 1996 President Clinton and Vice President Gore were reelected. However, Republicans retained their control of Congress. In the spring of 1997 Clinton and Congress announced that they had agreed on a federal budget plan to eliminate the deficit in five years. The government actually eliminated the deficit in one year, and by 1998 the budget showed a surplus.

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In 1997 the Democratic Party came under scrutiny for illegal campaign contributions and fundraising practices. At issue were allegations that the Democratic Party had collected contributions from foreign companies and individuals, who under campaign finance rules are not allowed to contribute money to political campaigns. There were also questions about whether Clinton tried to raise funds by holding coffee groups and allowing donors to spend the night in the White House. Committees formed by both houses of Congress began to investigate whether the Democratic Party had accepted illegal campaign contributions and whether these contributions were used as a way for people to gain access to the president. In addition, the Department of Justice began an investigation but refused to appoint an independent counsel, claiming no conflict of interest.

In 1998 the party was shaken by revelations that Clinton had had an affair with a 24-year-old White House intern, Monica Lewinsky, and then tried to conceal it. Democratic leaders and members of Congress rallied behind the president when he insisted that he had not had sexual relations with Lewinsky. However, an independent counsel investigated the Lewinsky matter and uncovered evidence that Clinton had lied. Clinton was eventually impeached by the Republican majority in the House of Representatives, but the Senate failed to remove him from office. The Republicans could not muster the required 67 votes.

Although the scandal left Democrats disillusioned and embittered with the president, it benefited the party. The Republicans misjudged the voters’ fatigue with the issue and their support of the president, and they made the scandal a central issue in the 1998 elections. Democrats, who were expected to lose seats as the president’s party traditionally does in off-year elections, gained five seats in the House of Representatives and avoided losses in the Senate. After the election, congressional Democrats wanted to express their displeasure with Clinton’s conduct by adopting an official rebuke, called a censure, but Republicans moved ahead with impeaching the president. People seemed to side with the Democrats, and the scandal left the Republicans, rather than the Democrats, in disarray.

XII

Disputed Presidential Election

In the 2000 presidential race, the Democratic Party nominated Vice President Al Gore as the party’s presidential candidate. Gore chose Joseph Lieberman, a senator from Connecticut, as his running mate. Lieberman was the first Jewish person to be nominated on a major party’s ticket. Gore ran against George W. Bush, the Republican nominee for president.

In the 2000 election, Democrats gained seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Republicans maintained a slight majority in the House, but the Senate was split evenly between the two parties. One of the newly elected Democratic senators was Hillary Clinton, who captured a seat from New York. It was the first time in U.S. history that a first lady was elected to the Senate. The presidential election, however, was so close that it was not decided until five weeks after Election Day. After much legal wrangling, Gore lost the election to Bush. See also Disputed Presidential Election of 2000.

The even split in the Senate ended in mid-2001 when Republican senator James Jeffords left his party and became an independent. His switch gave the Democrats control of the Senate, which they maintained until the 2002 midterm elections. In those elections the Democrats lost control of the Senate to the Republican Party. They also lost seats in the House of Representatives, which the Republicans continued to control. Many Democrats attributed the losses to President Bush’s popularity.

As the 2004 presidential election approached, however, many Democrats saw an opportunity for the party to regain the White House. Bush’s approval ratings began to decline as the U.S. economy failed to generate jobs and the U.S. war in Iraq began to resemble the Vietnam War quagmire. Bush’s ratings fell below 50 percent prior to the November election, a dangerous sign for an incumbent president. The Democrats selected U.S. Senator John F. Kerry of Massachusetts as their nominee after he won nearly all of the party’s state caucuses and primaries. Kerry picked U.S. Senator John Edwards of North Carolina as his running mate.

XIII

Bush’s Second Term

Nevertheless, Bush won the election with 51 percent of the popular vote, and the Republican Party widened its majority in both the House and the Senate. Bush’s victory stirred considerable soul-searching in the Democratic Party, which failed to carry a single Southern state and only one of the Great Plains states.

Following the 2004 presidential election, the party regrouped under the leadership of Howard Dean, former governor of Vermont and a presidential candidate in 2004. Dean advocated campaigning in every state, reversing a trend in which the Democrats focused almost exclusively on Democratic and tossup states and failed to campaign in areas considered secure for the Republicans.

The ongoing war in Iraq became a pivotal issue as the 2006 midterm elections approached. Polls showed that voters disapproved of Bush’s handling of the war and that most voters favored a pullout of U.S. occupation forces. Bush’s public approval ratings fell to their lowest ever with more than 60 percent of voters voicing disapproval of his job performance. The Republicans were also harmed by corruption scandals, which led to indictments of several congressmen. The Bush administration’s delayed and ineffective response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster cast further doubt on the competency of the Republicans’ leadership. Just weeks before the elections, Republican Mark Foley of Florida resigned from Congress after it was disclosed that he sent inappropriate messages laced with sexual innuendos to teenage congressional pages. Bush tried to link the war in Iraq with the war on terror and at a campaign rally said that a victory for the Democrats would represent a victory for the terrorists.

In the elections the Democrats regained control of the Senate and won a majority in the House. They also won a majority of the state houses with upset victories over Republicans in six gubernatorial contests, including the battleground states of Colorado and Ohio. Democratic candidates won key Senate races in Montana and Virginia, states that had previously been considered Republican territory, and in Missouri and Ohio, which are traditionally seen as bellwether states. Some polls indicated that independent voters went Democratic by a 2-to-1 margin and that nearly a third of Christian evangelicals, considered the core of the Republican base, voted for Democrats. The midterm results appeared to reinvigorate the Democratic Party.

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