The difference between Republicans and Democrats is Abraham Lincoln. Lincoln was a Republican against slavery, while Democrats, according to historian Doris Goodwin, (Team of Rivals), were known as the party of slavery. The battle over whether new western states would permit slavery, for the Democrats, meant ceding political control of the issue to abolitionists, as new anti-slave states would change the status quo in which slavery existed. Therefore, the southern Democrats declared secession from the Constitution of the United States.

Today, we see the Democrats declaring the Constitution unfair to them because the larger states have enough votes to get a majority of the nation’s votes, while the Constitution rests on the principle of weighting states by electoral votes to protect people in small states from having no weight in national elections.

Such protection for small states was necessary to the agreement of the 13 colonies to form a national government. What we conclude from this is that the Democrats have been the party of division, with an antagonism for the Constitution from the get go. That is why it is so historically typical for Democrats to pronounce a Republican Electoral College winner as illegitimate, because they view the Constitution as illegitimate. 

Howard Flora

Ledyard