Party System, Fifth (United States)

The New Deal Coalition, also known as the Fifth Party System, the period of United States national politics that begins with the New Deal in 1933, follows the Fourth Party System, usually called the Progressive Era.

Experts debate whether it ended in the mid-1960s (as the New Deal coalition did) or the mid-1990s, or continues to the present.

The System is heavily Democratic through 1964 and mostly Republican at the presidential level since 1968, with the Senate switching back and forth after 1980.

The Democrats usually control the House except that the Republicans win in 1946, 1952, and 1994 through 2004 elections.

Both chambers go Democratic in 2006.

Of the nineteen presidential elections since 1932, the Democrats win 7 of the first 9 (through 1964), with Democratic control of Congress as the norm; while the Republicans win 7 of the 10 since 1968, with divided government as the norm.With Republican promises of prosperity discredited by the Great Depression, the four consecutive elections, 1932-36-40-44 of Democrat Franklin D. Roosevelt give the Democrats dominance, though in domestic issues the Conservative coalition generally controls Congress from 1938 to 1964.

The activist New Deal promotes American liberalism, anchored in a New Deal Coalition of specific liberal groups -- especially ethno-religious constituencies (Catholics, Jews, African Americans) -- white Southerners, well-organized labor unions, urban machines, progressive intellectuals, and populist farm groups.

Opposition Republicans are split between a conservative wing, led by Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, and a more successful moderate wing exemplified by the politics of Northeastern elites such as Nelson Rockefeller, Jacob Javits and Henry Cabot Lodge.The period climaxes with Lyndon B. Johnson's smashing electoral defeat of conservative Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater in 1964; in no other election since 1944 except LBJ and Jimmy Carter in 1976 has the Democratic party received more than 50% of the popular vote for President, although in 1992 and 1996 this is due to the third-party candidacy of Ross Perot, and the Democrats get 5.6, and 8.5 percentage points more of the vote than the Republicans, respectively.

The Democratic coalition divides in 1948 and 1968, in the latter election allowing the Republican candidate Richard Nixon to take the White House.

Democrats keep control of the House until the 1994 election.

For the next twelve years the Republican Party is in control with small majorities, until the Democrats recapture the chamber with the 2006 election and the 110th Congress.

The Democrats hold the Senate until 1980; since then the two parties have traded control of the Senate back and forth with small majorities.

No related events match the current filters.