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 From Tv tropes https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/NewerThanTheyThink/LawsAndPolitics

Heavily partisan politics in America have only been the norm since around the 1980s. Prior to then, both major political parties had liberal and conservative wings, and it wasn't uncommon for Americans to vote for different parties from one election to the next. As recently as the 1976 presidential election, many people believed that Democrat Jimmy Carter was actually more conservative than his Republican opponent, Gerald Ford. This can mostly be chalked up to the heavily Democratic generation that grew up during the FDR administration (since one of the biggest indicators of your your partisan lean comes from how successful the president of your early adulthood is), beginning to die off and being replaced in the electorate by their more conservative kids. Since Democrats controlled pretty much everything from the FDR administration until the Carter administration (Eisenhower and Nixon were both incredibly moderate, at least on economics), Republicans had no other choice but to have separate factions and to play ball with Democrats. When Republicans controlled everything from the Civil War to the FDR administration, large swathes of the population were still disenfranchised and Republicans could do whatever the hell they want. The '80s was the first time the parties had very different electoral makeups because it was the first time anything was competitive when women and ethnic minorities could vote. Now that the parties' voters are so different note , they don't need to have different wings.

Seniors being a reliable Republican voting block is a recent phenomenon. As recently as the 2000 presidential election, Democrats’ best age group was those over the age of 65. This is due to the generational turnover as explained above.

The modern American political parties' development can be traced back to the Woodrow Wilson administration but didn’t really start taking shape until the FDR administration. For the second half of the 19th Century and well into the 20th, there wasn’t much difference between the parties other than support for tariffs (Republicans for, Democrats not so much). There were only two Democratic presidents between the Civil War and World War I since so many people supported Republican trade policies. By the time of the Depression, people voted for Roosevelt to just try something different since tariffs had so exacerbated the suffering. Roosevelt really only started experimenting with what’d become of the modern party’s economic principles (like adopting Keynesian economics) out of desperation more than anything. He was willing to throw everything against the wall in the hope that something would stick.

African Americans being almost monolithically (about 90%) Democrats only really dates back to the Civil Rights legislation of the Lyndon Johnson administration. When black men were granted the right to vote in the 1870s, they were almost exclusively Republicans because they were so oppressed by the solidly Democratic governors in the south and to support the party of Lincoln. Republican Theodore Roosevelt was the first president to have an official meeting with a black person and he made a point to start appointing more black people to federal positions. Things began to start to shift as more time passed from slavery and as they started leaving the south en masse and moving to the cities of the north in the early 20th century. It picked up throughout the New Deal Era of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. With urban Democrats supporting Unions in the North, there was an upward mobility for emigrants not seen back home. Dwight Eisenhower was the last Republican (who was incredibly moderate and really more of an Independent) to really try to reach out to black voters and court their support but by that point the damage had started to really take effect. The shift really took hold as the Democrats took the mantle of the party of Civil Rights in the '60s. No Republican presidential nominee has gotten more than 13% of the black vote since Richard Nixon in 1968.