Democratic Party
0Loading crowd target
0Loading crowd target
7correct to beat the crowd
50 free Democratic Party trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Founded in 1828, the Democratic Party is often described as the oldest active political party in the world. Its story runs from frontier populism through civil war, depression and the civil rights era to the present day, and along the way it has changed its base, its regional strongholds and many of its positions. This quiz covers how the party started and who organized it, where its donkey came from, the presidents it has sent to the White House, the nominees who fell short, and the conventions that made or broke it. You will also meet the factions, nicknames, landmark laws and trailblazing women and Black politicians that mark its history. It is written for general players as much as political junkies: students revising American history, quiz night hosts, and anyone curious about how one party has lasted for nearly two centuries. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Opponents mocked which 1828 candidate with an insult that gave the Democratic Party its donkey mascot?
Andrew Jackson
Andrew Jackson's enemies twisted his surname into 'jackass', and decades later magazine cartoons turned the donkey into the party's lasting mascot.
Q 02Which Harper's Weekly cartoonist popularized both the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant?
Thomas Nast
Thomas Nast also gave America its modern picture of Santa Claus, first drawing him for the magazine in the middle of the Civil War.
Q 03Which color has marked Democratic states on TV election maps since the networks all adopted one scheme in 2000?
Blue
Blue was far from fixed before then: networks swapped schemes for decades, and in 1980 NBC colored a 44-state Republican landslide blue.
Q 04Which president won four straight elections as a Democrat, prompting the two-term limit amendment?
Franklin Roosevelt
Franklin Roosevelt remains the only president elected to a third and fourth term; the Twenty-second Amendment closed that door for good in 1951.
Q 05Which president won a shock 1948 victory for Democrats after a newspaper had already printed news of his defeat?
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman won even though his party had split three ways, with breakaway tickets on both his left and his right drawing off voters.
Q 06Which president, the first Catholic to hold the office, won a razor-thin 1960 election for the Democrats?
John F. Kennedy
John F. Kennedy was also the youngest person ever elected president, at 43, though one predecessor had taken office a year younger without an election.
Q 07Burglars tied to Richard Nixon's campaign broke into Democratic Party offices in which Washington complex in 1972?
Watergate
Watergate became the name of the scandal that forced Nixon to resign in 1974, and its last syllable has been tacked onto scandals ever since.
Q 08Which little-known Illinois state senator electrified the 2004 Democratic convention with his keynote speech?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama won a US Senate seat that November and the presidency four years later, even though the big broadcast networks had skipped his speech.
Q 09Which Democrat won the presidency, lost it four years later, then won it back to serve two non-consecutive terms?
Grover Cleveland
Grover Cleveland actually won the popular vote all three times he ran; his 1888 defeat came only in the Electoral College.
Q 10Which Texan, a former Senate majority leader, signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 as a Democratic president?
Lyndon B. Johnson
Lyndon B. Johnson signed it only after the Senate broke a filibuster lasting more than two months, mounted largely by Southern senators from his own party.
Q 11Which president, nicknamed the Little Magician, built the Democratic Party's first national organization?
Martin Van Buren
Martin Van Buren grew up speaking Dutch in Kinderhook, New York, and remains the only president whose first language was not English.
Q 12Which city hosted the Democratic Party's first national convention in 1832, and every one after it for twenty years?
Baltimore
Baltimore staged the party's first six conventions; the nominating convention itself was a new idea, tried a year earlier by the tiny Anti-Masonic Party.
Q 13Which rival party, formed in the 1830s to oppose the Democrats, elected William Henry Harrison and Zachary Taylor?
The Whigs
Q 21Which California Democrat became the first woman Speaker of the House in 2007 and led her caucus for two decades?
Nancy Pelosi
Nancy Pelosi led House Democrats from 2003 to 2023, and was also the first Californian and the first Italian American to hold the speakership.
Q 22Which former California attorney general became the first woman elected vice president of the United States in 2020?
Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris was also the first Black and first Asian American vice president, and the first woman to hold presidential powers, briefly, as acting president.
Q 23Which Democrat won the 1876 popular vote yet lost the presidency by one electoral vote after a disputed count?
Samuel J. Tilden
Whigs took a name that cast the Democratic president of the day as a new King George III, the monarch Americans had once rebelled against.
Q 14Which former Princeton University president won the White House for Democrats in 1912 after Republicans split?
Woodrow Wilson
Woodrow Wilson, a Virginian by birth, became the first Southerner to win the presidency since 1848, and he had a PhD in history and political science.
Q 15Which Nebraska orator was the Democratic nominee for president three times, first at age 36, without ever winning?
William Jennings Bryan
William Jennings Bryan won his first nomination with the Cross of Gold speech, an attack on the gold standard that carried away the 1896 convention.
Q 16Which nickname stuck to the Southern Democrats who bolted over civil rights in 1948 and ran Strom Thurmond?
Dixiecrats
Dixiecrats carried four Deep South states and 39 electoral votes, but failed in their aim of throwing the election into the House of Representatives.
Q 17Which New York City Democratic machine, drawn by cartoonists as a tiger, was run by the notorious Boss Tweed?
Tammany Hall
Tammany Hall controlled Democratic nominations and patronage in Manhattan for over a century, relying on a network of largely Irish Catholic precinct leaders.
Q 18Which former Georgia governor and peanut farmer won the 1976 Democratic nomination as a little-known outsider?
Jimmy Carter
Jimmy Carter went on to win the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize, two decades after leaving office, for his long work on peace, democracy and human rights.
Q 19Which congresswoman became the first woman on a major-party ticket as Walter Mondale's 1984 running mate?
Geraldine Ferraro
Geraldine Ferraro had served three terms representing Queens, and her nomination was among the most emotional moments of the 1984 convention.
Q 20Which city hosted the 1968 Democratic convention, remembered for televised clashes between police and protesters?
Chicago
Chicago's mayor, Richard J. Daley, was the convention's host, and the heavy-handed tactics of his police force were broadcast to the whole country.
Samuel J. Tilden is the only candidate to win an outright majority of the popular vote and still lose; a commission gave every disputed elector to his rival.
Q 24Which Democrat won the 2000 popular vote but lost the presidency after the Supreme Court halted Florida's recount?
Al Gore
Al Gore turned to climate campaigning after the defeat, work that earned him a share of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize.
Q 25Which governor, nicknamed the Happy Warrior, was the first Catholic nominated for president by a major party?
Al Smith
Al Smith lost the 1928 election in a landslide, then headed the company that built and ran the Empire State Building.
Q 26Which Brooklyn congresswoman, the first Black woman elected to Congress, ran for the Democratic nomination in 1972?
Shirley Chisholm
Shirley Chisholm collected 152 first-ballot votes at the convention, as the first Black candidate to seek a major party's presidential nomination.
Q 27Which South Dakota senator lost 49 states to Richard Nixon in 1972 as the Democrats' anti-war presidential nominee?
George McGovern
George McGovern, a B-24 bomber pilot who flew 35 missions in World War II, carried only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.
Q 28Which name covers the Depression-era jobs, banking and relief programs that Democrats began passing in 1933?
New Deal
New Deal programs included the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put three million unemployed young men to work on public land.
Q 29Which health insurance program for Americans aged 65 and over did a Democratic Congress create in 1965?
Medicare
Medicare also spurred the integration of thousands of hospital floors and waiting rooms in 1966, because providers had to desegregate before they could be paid.
Q 30Which nickname is given to the Democratic officials and party leaders who get an automatic, unpledged convention vote?
Superdelegates
Superdelegates grew out of a 1982 party commission that set aside hundreds of seats for insiders; a 2018 reform then curbed their vote on the first ballot.