The support received was reflected in forming the so-called New Deal Coalition, the basis of Democratic party support for the following 50 years.

Second Term

After winning a victory in the 1936 presidential election, Roosevelt tried to neutralize the US Supreme Court by proposing the appointment of new justices, but Congress rejected this "court-packing" plan in 1937. In the subsequent years a congressional coalition of conservative Republicans and Democrats tried to curtail expansion of federal power into areas traditionally reserved to the states and checked the New Deal's momentum. The US involvement in the war in Europe drew attention away from the president's domestic defeats and made possible his victories over Republican candidates Wendell L. Willkie in 1940 and Thomas E. Dewey in 1944.

Pre-war Foreign Policy

Roosevelt was a pragmatist in his diplomatic views in the inter-war period. He pursued rather isolationism in the foreign policy in the 1920s. Then, in the late 1930s, spurred by Adolf Hitler's aggression in Europe and Japanese expansionism in the Pacific, Roosevelt moved the United States back towards engagement in world affairs. He was restrained, however, by the persistence of strong isolationist sentiment among the voters and by congressional passage of a series of neutrality laws intended to prevent American involvement in a second world war. Roosevelt won the contest when, alarmed by Germany's defeat of France in 1940, Congress passed his lend-lease legislation to help Great Britain's continued resistance to the Germans. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, brought the United States into the war on the side of Britain and the Soviet Union.

World War II

Roosevelt framed his diplomatic objectives as wartime leader in a series of wartime conferences. In collaboration with Winston Churchill he explained Anglo-American war aims in August 1941 in the form of the Atlantic Charter. It denied territorial ambitions, favoured self-government and liberal international trade arrangements, and pledged freedom from want and permanent security against aggression. The goals of the conferences can be summarized as follows:
· Casablanca, Morocco, in January 1943, Roosevelt and Churchill insisted on Germany's unconditional surrender as a means of preventing the enemy's future military resurgence
· Quebec Conference (August 1943) planned the Normandy invasion
· Moscow (October 1943) the Allied foreign ministers approved in principle a post-war organization for world security. · Tehran (November-December 1943) and Quebec (September 1944) served for discussion of the military strategy and the problem of post-war Germany
· Yalta in the USSR (February 1945), Roosevelt, Churchill, and Joseph Stalin broached their plans for a post-war world.