It is no accident that the repugs refer to us as the "Democrat" party. This was probably the first thing Palin learned while training at The Project for the New American Century (PNAC).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democrat_Party_(phrase)
ETA:
Snippet from Wiki..
History of usage
"Democrat Party" has been used from time to time by opponents of the Democratic Party and sometimes by others. The earliest known use of the term, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, was by a London stock-market analyst, who wrote in 1890, "Whether a little farmer from South Carolina named Tillman is going to rule the Democrat Party in America – yet it is this, and not output, on which the proximate value of silver depends."<3> The term was used by Herbert Hoover in 1932, and in the late 1930s by Republicans who used it to criticize Democratic big city machines run by powerful political bosses in what they considered undemocratic fashion. Republican leader Harold Stassen said in 1940, "I emphasized that the party controlled in large measure at that time by Hague in New Jersey, Pendergast in Missouri and Kelly-Nash in Chicago should not be called a 'Democratic Party.' It should be called the 'Democrat Party.'"<2>Democrat as an adjective was still sometimes used by some twentieth-century Republicans as a campaign tool but was used with particular virulence by the late senator Joseph R. McCarthy of Wisconsin, a Republican who sought by repeatedly calling it the Democrat party to deny it any possible benefit of the suggestion that it might also be democratic.
The noun-as-adjective has been used by Republican leaders since the 1940s and appears in some GOP national platforms since 1948.<4> In 1947, Republican leader Senator Robert A. Taft said, "Nor can we expect any other policy from any Democrat Party or any Democrat President under present day conditions. They cannot possibly win an election solely through the support of the solid South, and yet their political strategists believe the Southern Democrat Party will not break away no matter how radical the allies imposed upon it."<5> President Dwight D. Eisenhower used the term in his acceptance speech in 1952 and in partisan speeches to Republican groups.<6> Ruth Walker notes how Joseph McCarthy repeatedly used the phrase "the Democrat Party," and critics argue that if McCarthy used the term in the 1950s, then no one else should do so.<7> The Dan Smoot Report throughout the 50s and 60s used the phrase, almost without exception.
Strictly speaking, its use is a mirror reflection of the use of "Republican" in that "Republicans" make up the "Republican Party" whereas "Democrats" make up the "Democrat Party". The use of the term is an attempt to separate the people that make up the party from the principle outlined in their name. It stems from the notion that a collection of Democrats is not necessarily a democratic collection. However, the moniker of "Democrat" is derived from "Democratic Party" and not vice-versa so the construction in this fashion is not proper.
In 1996, the wording "Democratic Party" was removed throughout the Republican party platform. Party leaders said that they wanted to make the point that the Democratic Party had become elitist, no longer small-d democratic. In August 2008, the Republican platform committee voted down a proposal to use the phrase "Democrat Party" in the 2008 platform, deciding to use the proper "Democratic Party". "We probably should use what the actual name is," said Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour, the panel's chairman. "At least in writing."<8>
ETA II:
They even mention DU!
"...
Members of the Democratic Underground have proposed that "Republicon Party" be used as a counter to the Republican adoption of "Democrat Party" as a putdown.<29>
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