The United States Democratic Party has significantly evolved and includes various factions throughout its history. Into the 21st century, the liberal faction represents the modern American liberalism that began with the New Deal in the 1930s and continued with both the New Frontier and Great Society in the 1960s. The moderate faction supports Third Way politics that includes center-left social policies and centrist fiscal policies, mostly associated with the New Democrats and Clintonism of the 1990s, while the left-wing faction (known as progressives) advocates for progressivism and social democracy. Historical factions of the Democratic Party include the founding Jacksonians, the Copperheads and War Democrats during the American Civil War, the Redeemers, Bourbon Democrats, and Silverites in the late-19th century, and the Southern Democrats and New Deal Democrats in the 20th century. The early Democratic Party was also influenced by Jeffersonians and the Young America movement.
21st century factions Liberals
Modern liberalism in the United States began during the Progressive Era with President Theodore Roosevelt (a Republican) and his Square Deal and New Nationalism policies, with center-left ideas increasingly leaning toward the political philosophy of social liberalism, better known in the United States as modern liberalism. Following Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, Harry S. Truman's Fair Deal, John F. Kennedy's New Frontier, and Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society (the latter of which established Medicare and Medicaid) further established the popularity of liberalism in the nation and became part the Democratic tradition. While the resurgence of conservatism and the Third Way of Bill Clinton's New Democrats briefly weakened the influence of modern liberalism, Barack Obama acted as an ideological bridge. While characterizing himself as a New Democrat, Obama toed the ideological line between Third Way and modern liberalism.
The key legislative achievement of the Obama administration, the passage and enactment of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), was generally supported among liberal Democrats. Under Obama, Democrats achieved an expansion of LGBT rights and federal hate crime laws, rescinded the Mexico City policy (later reinstituted by President Donald Trump) and the ban on federal taxpayer dollars to fund research on embryonic stem cells, and implemented the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action and the Cuban thaw.
In 2011, the Democratic Leadership Council, which supported centrist and Third Way positions, was dissolved. In 2016, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton eschewed her husband's "New Covenant" centrism and pursued more liberal proposals, such as rolling back mandatory minimum sentencing laws, a debt-free college tuition plan for public university students, and a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. President Joe Biden, a moderate Democrat, also adopted more traditional liberal policies during his presidency and was more willing to address the concern of the progressive wing than Presidents Clinton and Obama.
Liberals include most of academia, as well as large portions of the professional class. The liberal wing differs from the traditional organized labor base. According to political scientists Matt Grossmann and David A. Hopkins, the increase in educational attainment in the United States has led to the increase of liberalism in the Democratic Party.
Moderates
Generally speaking, moderate Democrats are Democrats who are fiscally moderate-to-conservative and socially moderate-to-liberal. They are more likely to be located in swing states and swing seats. The success of modern liberalism was weakened with the presidency of Ronald Reagan and the ensuing tide of conservative popularity in response to a perception of liberal failure. In reaction to angst following Reagan's landslide victory over liberal Democrat Walter Mondale in the 1984 United States presidential election, the Third Way movement was formed. It is associated with the presidency of Bill Clinton and the New Democrats.
During the 1992 United States presidential election, Clinton and running mate Al Gore ran as New Democrats who were willing to synthesize fiscally conservative views with the more culturally liberal position of the Democratic Party ethos, or to harmonize center-left and center-right politics. Clinton was both the first Democrat elected president since 1976 and the first re-elected to a second full term since 1948. Most moderate Democrats in the United States House of Representatives are members of the New Democrat Coalition, although there is considerable overlap in the membership of New Democrats and Blue Dogs, with most Blue Dogs also being New Democrats. Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden largely tried to unify the various factions of the Democratic Party while still addressing the goals of the progressive wing, although Obama was hammered by the conservative factions and the Tea Party movement. The Third Way is still a large coalition in the modern Democratic Party. Clinton himself helped to move the Democratic Party beyond the New Democrats and the Third Way, owing to a more favorable political context than the 1990s, with Obama and Hillary Clinton representing a more liberal ambitious vision.
Since the 2010s, many former Republican moderates switched to identify as Democrats, namely former Florida governor and U.S. Representative Charlie Crist.
Progressives
The modern progressive wing draws deeply from the progressive economic and political philosophies of Woodrow Wilson's New Freedom and Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal, and more broadly from the New Deal coalition. Historically, progressives were not limited to the Democratic Party, and the modern progressives in the Democratic Party are influenced by the activist reformism of Theodore Roosevelt (particularly the Square Deal and New Nationalism, which in turn influenced the New Freedom and the New Deal) and Herbert Croly (who rejected the thesis that the liberal tradition was inhospitable to anti-capitalist alternatives), as well as La Follette family (particularly Robert M. La Follette who founded the Progressive Party in 1924) and former Franklin D. Roosevelt's Vice President Henry A. Wallace, who founded another Progressive Party in 1948 after denouncing the anti-Communist foreign policy of the liberal President Harry S. Truman.
The historical progressive wing of the Democratic Party is associated with William Jennings Bryan and the People's Party. They gained control of the party in 1896, when the Democratic Party selected at that time the youngest presidential candidate in Bryan and repudiated the more conservative administration of Grover Cleveland, and kept it until 1908, the last time Bryan was the presidential nominee. With the exception of 1904, when the Bourbon Democrats and conservative allies of Cleveland regained control while Theodore Roosevelt's platform included progressive policies advocated by Bryan and his supporters, the Democratic Party nominee was from the progressive wing. Bryan and the historical progressives successfully turned the Democratic Party from a conservative party to a progressive alliance that elected Wilson, Franklin D. Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson.
Unlike some members of the historical progressive wing, such as Bryan who held fundamentalist religious views, modern progressives in the Democratic Party are secular and culturally liberal on social issues like race and identity, where they draw inspiration from the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 proposed by President Kennedy, enacted by President Johnson, and advocated for by Martin Luther King Jr. While it does not transcend the political philosophy of modern liberalism, the progressive wing has fused tenets of cultural liberalism with the economic left-leaning traditions of the Progressive Era, as well as drawing more robustly from Keynesian economics, left-wing populism, and democratic socialism/social democracy, particularly through Franklin D. Roosevelt's Four Freedoms.
President Johnson and civil rights movement activists, such as King, were influential to progressives not only for their positions on race and identity but also on economics, for example Johnson for the Great Society, which has been called by some a "second Reconstruction", or King for his support of democratic socialism. While there are differences between them, both historical progressivism and the modern progressive movement share the belief that free markets lead to economic inequalities, and therefore that the free market must be aggressively monitored and regulated with broad economic and social rights to protect the working class.
The Congressional Progressive Caucus is a caucus of progressive House Democrats in the United States Congress, along with one independent in the Senate (Bernie Sanders), a progressive who identifies as a democratic socialist, and ran in the 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential primaries. Sanders is credited, alongside the Democratic Party's broader progressive wing, with influencing a leftward shift in the party, as well as for the election of several democratic socialists within the Democratic Party. In 2016, the Blue Collar Caucus, a pro-labor and anti-outsourcing caucus, was formed by representatives Marc Veasey and Brendan Boyle.
A small number of progressives self-identify as democratic socialists, although supporters and academic experts describe their beliefs as being closer to European social democracy and unrelated to actual socialism or communism. Since 2019, there have been at least six democratic socialists in the House of Representatives as members of the Democratic Party, and in doing so some of them defeated notable New Democrats incumbents, such as Joe Crowley and Eliot Engel, in the primaries. As of 2024, at least thirteen of socialist Democratic representatives had at some point been affiliated with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which is not an official part of the Democratic Party, including Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Rashida Tlaib, and Greg Casar, who was elected in 2024 to lead the progressive caucus. Former Democratic representatives, such as Ron Dellums, David Bonior, Major Owens, John Conyers, Jerry Nadler, Danny K. Davis, Shri Thanedar, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman, were also affiliated with the DSA. In turn, some progressive Democrats have sought to court or distance themselves from the organization.
Conservatives
The conservative coalition was an unofficial coalition in the United States Congress bringing together a conservative majority of the Republican Party and the conservative, mostly Southern wing of the Democratic Party. It was dominant in Congress from 1937 to 1963 and remained a political force until the mid-1980s, eventually dying out in the 1990s. In terms of Congressional roll call votes, it primarily appeared on votes affecting labor unions. The conservative coalition did not operate on civil rights bills, for the two wings had opposing viewpoints. However, the coalition did have the power to prevent unwanted bills from even coming to a vote. The coalition included many committee chairmen from the South who blocked bills by not reporting them from their committees. Furthermore, Howard W. Smith, Chairman of the House Rules Committee, often could kill a bill simply by not reporting it out with a favorable rule and he lost some of that power in 1961. The conservative coalition was not concerned with foreign policy as most of the Southern Democrats were internationalists, a position opposed by most Republicans.