The Republican Party, also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP), is one of the two major political parties in the United States. Founded in 1854, it is the second-oldest extant political party in the United States after its main political rival, the Democratic Party.
The Republican Party emerged to combat the expansion of slavery into western territories after the passing of the Kansas–Nebraska Act. The early Republican Party consisted of northern Protestants, factory workers, professionals, businessmen, prosperous farmers, and after the Civil War also of black former slaves. The party had very little support from white Southerners at the time, who predominantly backed the Democratic Party in the Solid South, and from Irish and German Catholics, who made up a major Democratic voting bloc. While both parties adopted pro-business policies in the 19th century, the early GOP was distinguished by its support for the national banking system, the gold standard, railroads, and high tariffs. The party opposed the expansion of slavery before 1861 and led the fight to dismantle the Confederate States of America (1861–1865). While the Republican Party had almost no presence in the Southern United States at its inception, it was successful in the Northern United States, where by 1858 it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state.
With the election of its first president, Abraham Lincoln, in 1860, the party's success in guiding the Union to victory in the Civil War, and the party's role in the abolition of slavery, the Republican Party largely dominated the national political scene until 1932. In 1912, former Republican president Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive Party after being rejected by the GOP and ran unsuccessfully as a third-party presidential candidate calling for social reforms. The GOP lost its congressional majorities during the Great Depression (1929–1940); under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the Democrats formed a winning New Deal coalition that was dominant from 1932 through 1964.
The party's platform changed abruptly in the mid-1960s, a moment in which the two parties essentially traded platforms, especially with regard to civil rights and social justice plank. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Southern strategy, the party's core base shifted with the Southern states becoming more reliably Republican in presidential politics and the Northeastern states becoming more reliably Democratic. White voters increasingly identified with the Republican Party after the 1960s. Following the Supreme Court's 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade, the Republican Party opposed abortion in its party platform and grew its support among evangelicals. The Republican Party won five of the six presidential elections from 1968 to 1988. Two-term President Ronald Reagan, who held office from 1981 to 1989, was a transformative party leader. His conservative policies called for reduced social government spending and regulation, increased military spending, lower taxes, and a strong anti-Soviet Union foreign policy. Reagan's influence upon the party persisted into the 21st century.
In 2016, businessman and media personality Donald Trump became the party's nominee for president, won the presidency, and shifted the party further to the right. Since the 1990s, the party's support has chiefly come from the South, the Great Plains, the Mountain States, and rural areas in the North. It supports free market economics, cultural conservatism, and originalism in constitutional jurisprudence. There have been 19 Republican presidents, the most from any one political party.
Since 1980, Republicans have won seven out of the last twelve presidential elections, winning in the presidential elections of 1980 and 1984 (with Ronald Reagan, 1981–1989), 1988 (with George H. W. Bush, 1989–1993), 2000 and 2004 (with George W. Bush, 2001–2009), and 2016 and 2024 (with Donald Trump, 2017–2021 and since 2025). However, Republicans have lost the popular vote in 2000 and 2016 but won the Electoral College in both elections (with George W. Bush and Donald Trump, respectively). These were two of the four presidential elections in which Republicans lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, the others being the presidential elections in 1876 and 1888.
Beginnings: 1854–1861
The American party system had been dominated by Whigs and Democrats for decades leading up to the Civil War. But the Whig party's increasing internal divisions had made it a party of strange bedfellows by the 1850s. An ascendant anti-slavery wing clashed with a traditionalist and increasingly pro-slavery Southern wing. These divisions came to a head in the 1852 election, and the party collapsed rapidly in the next four years.
The decisive factor in realignment was the Kansas–Nebraska Act, passed by Democrats in 1854. It opened western territory to slavery, and made the expansion of slavery the most important issue. The Act opened Kansas Territory and Nebraska Territory to slavery and future admission as slave states, thus implicitly repealing the prohibition on slavery in territory north of 36° 30′ latitude that had been part of the Missouri Compromise. This change was viewed by anti-slavery Northerners as an aggressive, expansionist maneuver by the slave-owning South. Opponents of the Act were intensely motivated and began forming a new party. Opponents created the new Republican Party, which took in many Whigs and most Free Soilers. The Party began as a coalition of anti-slavery Conscience Whigs such as Zachariah Chandler and Free Soilers such as Salmon P. Chase.Paul Finkelman and Peter Wallenstein, eds. The encyclopedia of American political history (2001), p 226.Eric Foner, Free soil, free labor, free men: the ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (1970).
The first anti-Nebraska local meeting where "Republican" was suggested as a name for a new anti-slavery party was held in a Ripon, Wisconsin schoolhouse on March 20, 1854.The Origin of the Republican Party by Prof. A. F. Gilman, Ripon College, WI, 1914. The first statewide convention that formed a platform and nominated candidates under the Republican name was held near Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854. At that convention, the party opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories and selected a statewide slate of candidates.William Stocking, ed. Under the Oaks: Commemorating the Fiftieth Anniversary of the Founding of the Republican Party, at Jackson, Michigan, July 6, 1854 (1904) online The Midwest took the lead in forming state Republican Party tickets. Missouri had slavery and in St. Louis and areas adjacent to free states came the only efforts to organize the new party in the South.Allan Nevins, . Ordeal of the Union: A House Divided, 1852–1857. Vol. 2 (1947) pp. 316–323.William E. Gienapp, The origins of the Republican Party, 1852–1856 (1987) pp. 189–223.
On September 20, 1854, a "People's Convention" was held in Aurora, Illinois, at the First Congregational Church to discuss slavery. L.D. Brady was elected chairman of that first Republican convention. It was a representative gathering of 208 delegates who had been selected to form an anti-slavery party. The name "Republican" was adopted at this convention, together with a platform that formed the basis of the Lincoln-Douglas debates.
The new Republican Party envisioned modernizing the United States, emphasizing expanded banking, more railroads and factories, and giving free western land to farmers ("free soil") as opposed to letting slave owners buy up the best properties. It vigorously argued that free market labor was superior to slavery and was the very foundation of civic virtue and true republicanism; this was the "Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men" ideology. Without using the term "containment", the Republican Party in the mid-1850s proposed a system of containing slavery. Historian James Oakes explains the strategy: The federal government would surround the south with free states, free territories, and free waters, building what they called a 'cordon of freedom' around slavery, hemming it in until the system's internal weaknesses forced the slave states one by one to abandon slavery.
The Republican Party launched its first national organizing convention in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on February 22, 1856. This gathering elected a governing National Executive Committee and passed resolutions calling for the repeal of laws enabling slaveholding in free territories and "resistance by Constitutional means of Slavery in any Territory", defense of anti-slavery individuals in Kansas who were coming under physical attack, and a call to "resist and overthrow the present National Administration" of Franklin Pierce, "as it is identified with the progress of the Slave power to national supremacy".Johnson (ed.), Proceedings of the First Three Republican National Conventions of 1856, 1860 and 1864, pp. 10–11. Its first national nominating convention was held in June 1856 in Philadelphia. John C. Frémont ran as the first Republican nominee for President in 1856 behind the slogan "Free soil, free silver, free men, Frémont and victory!" Although Frémont's bid was unsuccessful, the party showed a strong base. It dominated in New England, New York, and the northern Midwest and had a strong presence in the rest of the North. It had almost no support in the South, where it was roundly denounced in 1856–1860 as a divisive force that threatened civil war.Gould 2003
The Republican Party absorbed many of the previous traditions of its members, who had come from an array of political factions, including Working Men,Including Orestes Brownson of New York. There were Working Men's Parties in New York, Philadelphia, Boston, and other urban areas in the North. Locofoco Democrats,Including William Cullen Bryant and John Bigelow, both of the New York Post. Free Soil Democrats,Including David Wilmot of Pennsylvania, John C. Fremont of California, and Isaac P. Christiancy of Michigan. Free Soil Whigs,Including Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Henry Wilson of Massachusetts, and James Harlan of Iowa. anti-slavery Know Nothings,Including Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, Henry S. Lane of Indiana, and Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania. Conscience Whigs,Including Abraham Lincoln of Illinois, Schuyler Colfax of Indiana, and William H. Seward of New York. and Temperance Reformers of both parties.Including Whigs Neal Dow of Maine and Alvan E. Bovay of Wisconsin, and Democrats Hannibal Hamlin of Maine and John Bidwell of California. Many Democrats who joined were rewarded with governorships,Including Nathaniel P. Banks of Massachusetts, Kinsley Bingham of Michigan, William H. Bissell of Illinois, Salmon P. Chase of Ohio, Hannibal Hamlin of Maine, Samuel J. Kirkwood of Iowa, Ralph Metcalf of New Hampshire, Lot Morrill of Maine and Alexander Randall of Wisconsin. or seats in the U.S. Senate,Including Bingham and Hamlin, as well as James R. Doolittle of Wisconsin, John P. Hale of New Hampshire, Preston King of New York, Lyman Trumbull of Illinois and David Wilmot of Pennsylvania. or House of Representatives.William D. Kelley of Pennsylvania.