are elected at the same time of the presidential elections. The party also has staff positions occupied by Stephen Handwerk as executive director, Michelle Brister as Deputy Executive Director, and D'seante Parks as Communications Director. Party history Early history The Democratic Party developed in Louisiana by the middle 1830s. The party was the product of the Jacksonians, "who had come to be called simply Democrats." The early support for the Democratic Party came from cotton planters, who supported its anti-tariff stance, and people of ethnic French and Spanish ancestry, who were descended largely from colonists. Anglo-Americans who had settled the state from other parts of the South sometimes supported the Whigs. By the 1840s New Orleans had a large increase in population due to an influx of thousands of Irish and German immigrants; most of them became Democrats, as the party worked to integrate them into American life. As the Civil War approached, the main opposition party to the Democrats, the Whigs, collapsed. The dispute over the issue of slavery divided the Whigs into two main camps: those who opposed the expansion of slavery and those who agreed with the Democrats' stance "that the expansion of slavery was essential to its survival." As a result, the Democratic Party dominated antebellum Louisiana. The new opposition party, the Know-Nothings, who were nativists, held power only in New Orleans for a brief period of time. Governors of Louisiana The Democratic Party won its first governorship in 1843 with the election of Alexandre Mouton. It would continue to win elections throughout the rest of the antebellum period. At the onset of the Civil War, the Democratic party won both elections held for the governorship in the portions of Louisiana that were held by the Confederate States of America. During Reconstruction, the Republican Party rose to power in the state with the enfranchisement of freedmen under constitutional amendments; they affiliated with the party that had gained their freedom and the end to slavery. Democratic insurgents were active in the state, and elections were accompanied by fraud and violence as they sought to suppress the black Republican vote. Following the disputed election of 1872, in which both parties' candidates declared victory, armed Democrats took over state offices in New Orleans for several days, struggling to unseat Republicans. The Colfax Massacre of blacks in Grant Parish was also related to this dispute. In 1874 the Democratic paramilitary