Steve Schmidt has been a Democrat for only a day and already....

[LeftInTX]

175. It's been around longer than Bush

I knew someone who was employed by the Democratic Party who called it that..(But she was born in the late 1990's) Her parents are committed Democrats also, so I think she learned the phrase at home. She is from a very red area of Texas, so maybe everyone over there calls it that? We had to correct her.

I hear it called "Democrat Party" by a few native Texans now and then. Most of them have southern accents. (All of them are Democrats). When I hear it from other Democrats, I think more of bad grammar than something malicious.


Bush took advantage of it, but he didn't make up the usage. Bush probably heard it in Midland growing up.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(epithet)

Early 20th century

The 1919 New Teachers' and Pupils' Cyclopaedia entry for Woodrow Wilson states that "In 1912, Wilson was the Democrat Party nominee for President ..."[25] On July 14, 1922, a newspaper in Keytesville, Missouri, posted an advertisement for its primary elections with the Democratic candidates identified as "Representing: Democrat Party".[26]
Late 20th century

The noun-as-adjective has been used by Republican leaders since the 1940s, and in most GOP national platforms since 1948. By the early 1950s, the term was in widespread use among Republicans of all factions.[27] When Senator Thruston Ballard Morton became chairman of the Republican National Committee in 1959, he indicated that he had always said Democratic Party and would continue to do so, which contrasted with his predecessor, Meade Alcorn, and with National Republican Senatorial Committee chairman Barry Goldwater, both of whom used Democrat Party.[28] According to Congressional Quarterly, at the 1968 Republican National Convention "the GOP did revert to the epithet of 'Democrat' party. The phrase had been used in 1952 and 1956 but not in 1960 and 1964".[4]

According to William Safire, Minnesota Governor Harold Stassen, campaign manager to Republican Wendell Willkie during the 1940 presidential campaign, explained that because the Democratic Party was at that time partly controlled by undemocratic city bosses, "by Hague in New Jersey, Pendergast in Missouri and Kelly-Nash in Chicago, [it] should not be called a 'Democratic Party.' It should be called the 'Democrat Party.'"[29]

Columnist Russell Baker wrote in 1976:

The origin of this illiterate phrase, goes back, I believe to the era of Sen. Joseph R. McCarthy ... The chief trouble with "the Democrat party" is that it makes the Republicans saying it sound both illiterate and coy, and, so, is like a shotgun that is all kick and no fire ... A party whose membership is down to 22 percent of the electorate, as the Republican party is, hardly needs ways to irritate voters from the opposing party whom it must seduce if it is to succeed.[30]

During the 1984 Republican National Convention, use of the term was a point of contention among the delegates.[31] When a member of the Republican platform committee asked unanimous consent to change the phrasing of a platform amendment to read Democrat Party instead of Democratic Party, New York Representative Jack Kemp objected, saying that would be "an insult to our Democratic friends;" the committee dropped the proposal.[6]