Fifth Party System

The Fifth Party System refers to the era of American national politics that began with the New Deal in 1933. This era emerged from the realignment of the voting blocs and interest groups supporting the Democratic Party into the New Deal Coalition following the Great Depression. For this reason it is sometimes called the New Deal Party System. It followed the Fourth Party System, usually called the Progressive Era. Experts debate whether it ended in the mid-1960s (as the New Deal coalition did), the early 1980s (when the Moral Majority was formed), the mid-1990s, or continues to the present. The System was 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 controlled the House of Representatives except that the Republicans won in 1946, 1952, 1994–2004, 2010, and 2012 elections. Both chambers went Democratic in 2006. Of the twenty presidential elections since 1932, the Democrats won 7 of the first 9 (through 1964), with Democratic control of Congress as the norm; while the Republicans won 7 of the 12 since 1968, with divided government as the norm.

With Republicans losing support because of the Great Depression, the four consecutive elections, 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944, of Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the Democrats dominance, though in domestic issues the conservative coalition generally controlled Congress from 1938 to 1964. The activist New Deal promoted 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 were split between a conservative wing, led by Ohio Senator Robert A. Taft, and a more successful moderate wing exemplified by the politics of Northeastern leaders such as Nelson Rockefeller, George W. Romney, William Scranton and Henry Cabot Lodge.

The Democratic coalition divided in 1948 and 1968, in the latter election allowing the Republican candidate Richard Nixon to take the White House. Republicans gained support from the formation of the Reagan coalition in the 1980s. Democrats kept control of the House of Representatives until the 1994 election. For the next twelve years the GOP was in control with small majorities, until the Democrats recaptured the chamber with the 2006 election and the 110th Congress. The Democrats held the Senate until 1980; after 1980, the two parties traded control of the Senate back and forth with small majorities, until the Democrats briefly held a supermajority in 2009.