Chart of U.S. Political Party History

The chart is interactive. All text and most areas of the chart are links to additional information. If you click or touch within an area that has a small black box in the lower right-hand corner, information will appear near the top of the screen in the orange area just below the party color key. If there is no black box, you'll be taken to a webpage, usually Wikipedia. Use your browser's back button to return to the chart.

If text appears in the orange area, you can erase it by clicking the X in the upper left corner of the screen.

The top of the chart is a color-coded key to the major political parties found in the chart. The tiny number in the upper-left of an area indicates the number of the politician from the founding of the country. For example, George Washington was the 1^st president and Joe Biden is the 46^th. The dagger symbol (†) indicates that the politician died in office.

The chart should work with any browser, and will scale to any size screen, but you may find the chart difficult to read on small smartphone screens.

Technical

Some people have asked what software was used to create this interactive chart. No software was used. This chart was hand-coded in Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) by Ed Sawicki.