The origins of the Democratic donkey can be traced to the 1828 presidential campaign of Andrew Jackson when his opponents called him a jackass. Jackson was amused by this and included an image of the animal in his campaign posters. In the 1870s political cartoonist Thomas Nast helped popularize the donkey as a symbol for the entire Democratic Party.
The elephant was featured as a Republican symbol in a few cartoons during the Civil War, it took hold when Thomas Nast used it in an 1874 Harper’s Weekly cartoon titled “The Third-Term Panic.”
By Elizabeth Nix, https://tinyurl.com/y3tdw3dn
