The Democratic and Republican Parties

American parties are coalitions held together by elections, not organisations that command their members.

Feature	United States	Contrast with the UK
Candidate selection	Primary voters in each state or district	Party members and local associations
Policy statement	A platform agreed at the National Party Convention	A manifesto that generates a mandate
Structure	Fifty largely autonomous state parties	A single national organisation
Discipline	Whips can persuade but cannot deselect	The whip can be withdrawn, ending a career

The decisive difference is candidate selection. Because a member of Congress owes their nomination to primary voters rather than to the party leadership, the leadership has limited leverage over them. That is why a platform binds nobody: a candidate elected on it can depart from it without sanction.

The consequence is that both parties are best understood as coalitions of factions competing for control of a label. In 2024 Trump spoke about the MAGA movement as often as about the Republican Party, and campaigned on positions — protective tariffs, scepticism about NATO, hostility to what he called unnecessary wars — that broke with Republican leaders from the 1950s to the 2000s. A party label in the US describes who is currently winning the internal argument.

This is the sharpest and most durable divide between the parties.

Issue	Democratic position	Republican position
Abortion	Harris in 2024: every woman should have the right to an abortion	Trump moved from backing a national ban to leaving the decision to each state
Guns	Support the Second Amendment but favour background checks and a ban on assault weapons	Strong defence of the Second Amendment with few restrictions
Same-sex marriage	Supported and defended since Obergefell v Hodges (2015)	Divided, with social conservatives opposed
Crime and policing	Reform of policing, but the leadership rejected defunding	Law and order framing, backing police funding and federal intervention

Abortion since Dobbs. Dobbs v Jackson Women's Health Organization (2022) overturned Roe v Wade (1973) and returned abortion law to the states. That converted a national constitutional question into fifty separate political fights, and gave both parties a reason to campaign on it. Harris made abortion rights central to her 2024 message; polling earlier that year suggested only about one American in ten wanted an outright ban. It was not enough, because the economy and living standards ranked higher for most voters.

Crime as a party dividing line. In 2020, a faction of the Democratic Party associated with the Black Lives Matter protests called for police departments to be defunded and the money moved to social services. Biden declined to support it, and Trump used the demand to present the Democrats as soft on crime while deploying federal officers to cities where disorder broke out. In 2024 Harris pushed back by stressing her record as California's Attorney-General — evidence that Democratic candidates treat the crime issue as a vulnerability to be managed.

The textbook version is that Democrats favour intervention and Republicans favour markets. The 2024 election shows why that version needs qualifying.

Policy	Harris, 2024	Trump, 2024
Income tax	Restore the child tax credit and earned income tax credit for middle and working-class Americans	Extend the individual tax cuts introduced in his first term
Corporation tax	Higher rates on large corporations	Extend corporate tax cuts
Prices	Act against unreasonable food price rises, described as price-gouging	End inflation, without a detailed mechanism
Trade	Oppose blanket tariffs as harmful to American workers, while refusing to tolerate unfair practices	Tariffs of 20% on imports generally, rising to 60% on Chinese goods

On tax the parties fall where you would expect: Democrats redistribute towards lower and middle earners, Republicans cut rates for individuals and businesses. In 2020 Biden proposed raising the top rates of income and corporation tax to fund green infrastructure, which is the same logic.

On trade the expected pattern reverses. Tariffs are a large-scale government intervention in the market, and Trump made them a Republican policy. The intervention has run into constitutional limits: as reported in April 2026, the Supreme Court ruled that he could not use the International Emergency Economic Powers Act 1977 to impose sweeping import levies, because the Constitution reserves the taxing power to Congress. Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Barrett and Justice Gorsuch joined the three liberal justices in that decision.

The safest formulation for an essay is that the parties disagree about who benefits from intervention rather than about intervention as such. Republicans intervene for domestic producers; Democrats intervene for consumers and lower earners.

Welfare is where the underlying philosophies are clearest. Democrats treat federal provision as the remedy for insecurity; Republicans accept a floor of provision but prefer personal responsibility, state-level control and a smaller federal role.

The Affordable Care Act 2010, universally known as Obamacare, is the case study that carries the argument.

Stage	What happened
2010	The ACA extended health insurance to millions of uninsured Americans
Trump's first term	The tax penalty for not buying insurance was removed
2020	Biden campaigned on extending the ACA; Republicans objected to the level of federal involvement
October 2025	A federal government shutdown began after Democrats refused to back a funding bill that omitted subsidies for buying insurance under the ACA

The 2025 shutdown is the strongest recent evidence of how deep the welfare divide runs. Democrats in the Senate, led by Chuck Schumer, were under pressure from their own grassroots not to compromise, and were betting that voters would blame Republicans for a rise in health insurance premiums. Trump's team calculated the opposite, presenting the Democrats as obstructing government in order to fund healthcare for undocumented migrants.

Within the Democratic Party, welfare is also a factional battleground. Medicare for All — universal, government-funded insurance replacing private cover — was Bernie Sanders' signature demand in 2020. Biden declined to adopt it, judging that it could not pass Congress and would alienate middle-ground voters. The party's centre of gravity on welfare is therefore to the right of its most active supporters.

Issue 4 of the specification, published in May 2026, added immigration as a fourth attitude area. It is the issue on which the parties have moved furthest, and the one on which the Democrats are most exposed.

The Republican position has been consistent since 2016: control of the southern border first. Trump's hallmark first-term policy was the border wall; in 2024 he campaigned on the Biden administration's record on illegal crossings and pledged to use the National Guard to deport migrants if necessary.

The Democratic position has shifted under pressure. In 2020, Biden proposed making asylum claims at the Mexican border easier and supported Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which allows people brought illegally into the US as children to remain. By 2024 Harris was stressing her commitment to curbing illegal crossings and attacking Trump for undermining a border reform deal that the Biden administration had agreed with Republicans in Congress, so that he could keep the issue alive.

Why the shift happened. The 2024 exit data explain it. Trump's support among Latino voters rose by an estimated 13 points on 2020, and an estimated 56% of Latinos voted for Harris. Many Latino voters who were themselves settled in the US were as hostile to illegal immigration as white voters, and were also more exposed to inflation. Immigration had stopped functioning as an issue that automatically bound minority voters to the Democratic Party.

The specification names three tendencies in each party. Learn the labels, then attach a person and a policy to each.

The Democratic Party

Faction	Position	Figures and policies
Liberals / progressives	Redistribution, expanded federal provision, climate action	Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez; Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, abolishing tuition fees
Moderates	Incremental reform, electability, working with business	Joe Biden, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg, Michael Bloomberg
Conservatives	Fiscal caution, socially traditional, often from Republican-leaning states	Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who sat as an independent by the end of his career and retired in 2024

The Republican Party

Faction	Position	Figures and policies
Moderates	Internationalist, business-oriented, uneasy with populism	Nikki Haley, who contested the 2024 primaries to Super Tuesday; John Kasich, who spoke at the 2020 Democratic convention
Social conservatives / the religious right	Traditional family policy, opposition to abortion, religion in public life	J. D. Vance, who campaigned openly on traditional family values; anti-abortion activists platformed at the 2020 convention
Fiscal conservatives	Low taxes, spending restraint, deficit reduction	Uncomfortable with both tariffs and the cost of Trump-era spending

Where power actually sits. The 2020 Democratic contest was won by the moderate wing: Sanders led after New Hampshire and Nevada, and moderates then consolidated behind Biden. On the Republican side, the populist tendency has held control since 2016. Haley's campaign in 2024 was the moderates' clearest test, and she carried one state out of the fifteen voting on Super Tuesday. Vance's selection as running mate — a social conservative with roots in the technology sector — signalled where the party's future leadership was expected to come from rather than an attempt to broaden its appeal.

The evidence for polarisation:

• Party-line legislating. No Democrat in either chamber voted for the Republican tax-cutting bill of 2025. It passed the House narrowly, opposed by the Democrats and by two Republicans, and cleared the Senate only on Vice-President Vance's casting vote — despite unified Republican government.
• Shutdowns as a routine tactic. There were two federal government shutdowns between 1990 and 2013 and five between 2013 and 2025, including the longest in US history at 35 days in 2018–19 and the shutdown that began in October 2025.
• Oversight suppressed by loyalty. During Trump's first presidency Mike Enzi, the Republican chair of the Senate Budget Committee, declined to hold a hearing on the president's 2020 budget on the grounds that it would create animosity within the party.
• Ideological sorting. Republicans have moved right and Democrats left, so the moderate overlap that once let members work across the aisle has thinned.

The evidence against a total breakdown:

• Cross-party caucuses such as the steel caucus organise around a shared industry or region rather than a party.
• Some legislation still passes with both parties. Biden's 2021 infrastructure bill attracted Republican support in Congress; the main resistance came from House Democrats on the left who wanted a social spending bill voted on alongside it.
• Defence and foreign policy attract more agreement, because members are reluctant to appear unpatriotic. Congress overrode Trump's veto of the National Defence Authorisation Act at the end of his first presidency, which required a two-thirds vote in both chambers.
• Shutdowns have been averted. Compromise settlements headed one off in March 2024 and again in March 2025.

As of September 2026 the 119th Congress operates under unified Republican control, with the House having begun the Congress at 220–215 and the Senate at 53–47. Unified government reduces the need for bipartisanship without removing the internal factional bargaining, which is where the real negotiation now happens.

1. Treating a party platform as a manifesto

A UK manifesto creates a mandate and is enforced by the whip. A US platform is a statement of the delegates' preferences that binds no elected official. Making this comparison explicitly earns comparative marks on Paper 3.

2. Missing immigration out of 5.2.1

Issue 4 added immigration as a fourth attitude area, alongside social and moral issues including crime, economic intervention and social welfare. An answer covering only the older three has omitted assessable content.

3. Saying Republicans are the party of free markets without qualification

Tariffs of 20%, rising to 60% on Chinese goods, are a substantial intervention in the market. Note the shift and explain it, rather than repeating a description that has stopped fitting.

4. Listing factions without evidence of their relative strength

The examiner wants the changing distribution of power. Show it with outcomes: moderates consolidated behind Biden in 2020; Haley carried one state on Super Tuesday in 2024.

5. Asserting polarisation without measuring it

Use countable evidence — a party-line vote, the number of shutdowns in a defined period, the length of the 2018–19 shutdown — and then present the bipartisan counter-examples, so the judgement is earned rather than assumed.

6. Reaching no judgement on convergence versus polarisation

A 30-mark answer needs a sustained line. Decide whether the parties are further apart than a generation ago, say so early, and use the counter-evidence to qualify the claim instead of leaving both sides balanced.