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One of the two major political parties in the United States; the Democrats . The origins of the Democrats are in the Democratic-Republican party, organized by Thomas Jefferson in the late eighteenth century; the first president elected simply as a Democrat was Andrew Jackson . Always strong in the South, the party was severely damaged by secession , the Civil War , and Reconstruction , and did not produce a winning presidential candidate between 1861 and 1885, when Grover Cleveland was elected. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in contrast to the Republicans , the Democrats tended to be the party of the South and West, opposed to the interests of business and the Northeast. Woodrow Wilson , the next Democratic president, was part of the Progressive movement . In the period of the New Deal , in the presidency of Franklin D. Roosevelt , the Democratic party reached enormous strength among labor union members, minority groups, and middle-income people. The Democratic presidents since Roosevelt have been Harry S. Truman , John F. Kennedy , Lyndon Johnson , James Earl Carter , and William Jefferson Clinton .