Franklin D. Roosevelt

Before Roosevelt, the Democrats were largely a party of the white South and northern city machines, suspicious of federal power. The New Deal coalition he built added industrial unions, northern Black voters who had backed the party of Lincoln, Catholic and Jewish immigrants, farmers and liberal intellectuals, and committed the party to an active federal government. It won seven of the nine presidential elections from 1932 to 1964. Its internal contradiction, Southern segregationists alongside Black voters, eventually broke it apart.