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.
Conservatism
The meaning of "conservatism" in the United States has little in common with the way the word is used elsewhere. As Ribuffo (2011) notes, "what Americans now call conservatism much of the world calls liberalism or neoliberalism". Since the 1950s, conservatism in the United States has been chiefly associated with the Republican Party. However, during the era of segregation many Southern Democrats were conservatives and they played a key role in the Conservative coalition that largely controlled domestic policy in Congress from 1937 to 1963, The Conservative Democrats continued to have influence in the U.S. politics until 1994's Republican Revolution, when the American South shifted from solid Democrat to solid Republican, while maintaining its conservative values.