"Those historians who did not simply regard the Democratic party as having no history before Wilson tended to draw their cues from the largely progressive Republican sources which they employed. Fortunately, a number of studies of the congressional Democrats have appeared in recent years to correct this stereotype. The investigations of Senate voting conducted by Howard Allen and Jerome Clubb clearly reveal the more consistent support for reform measures provided by Democratic, rather than Republican, members. David A. Sarasohn argues convincingly that, from 1905 at least, the Democrats were consistently the more progressive party, both in Congress and in their national candidates and platforms, and that the electoral victory of 1912 was not the result of a lucky windfall, in the shape of a Republican split, but the logical outcome of their growing identification with progressive policies over the preceding seven or eight years. Elizabeth Sanders’s account of agrarian politics, Roots of Reform, which is essentially a congressional history of the Democratic party during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, establishes its progressive credentials still more emphatically."