Conservative Democrat
After 1980, the Republicans became a mostly right-wing conservative party, with conservative leaders such as Newt Gingrich, Trent Lott, and Tom DeLay, while the Democrats, while keeping their core liberal bases intact with such Senators as Ted Kennedy, Christopher Dodd, and Paul Sarbanes, grew a substantial moderate/centrist wing, the New Democrats, in the 1990s in place of their old conservative wing, with leaders such as Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and Evan Bayh. In the 2010 midterm elections, many conservative Democrats lost their seats to the Republicans.
Modern liberalism in the United States
In the first half of the twentieth century, both major American parties had a conservative wing and a liberal wing. The conservative northern Republicans and the conservative southern Democrats formed the Conservative Coalition which dominated the US congress in the pre-Civil Rights era. As the Democratic Party under President Lyndon Johnson began to support civil rights, the formerly Solid South, meaning solidly Democratic, became solidly Republican, except in districts with a large number of African-American voters.