The Republican Party Essay

The Republican Party, one of the two major parties of the United States, was founded in 1854 as the “Free Soil Party” at the “Under the Oaks Convention”, an anti-slavery convention in Jackson, Michigan. (GOP.com) As the remains of the Northern Whig Party, they united under the common goal of ending slavery, and the name “Republicans” was chosen as an allusion to the Democratic-Republican party of Thomas Jefferson. Abraham Lincoln was the first Republican president, and he issued the Emancipation Proclamation. The Republicans were also the party of women’s suffrage, as this was nothing but a continuation of the Abolitionist movement that the party was founded on. But soon after the 1930s, the Republican party began to shift towards the right,

In 1967, he ran for Governor of California and got elected. After finishing his second term as Governor, Reagan ran for the presidency in 1976. Although we did not win the Republican nomination, losing to Gerald Ford by approximately 100 delegates, he made a large turnaround, and became a well-known Republican figure. Jimmy Carter won the presidency against incumbent Gerald Ford, and Reagan was simultaneously planning how he would win the presidency in the next election. As the 1980 election came around, Reagan did much that was not considered common for the Republican party. Firstly, he presented himself as more of a centrist candidate. Secondly, he did not follow an unwritten rule in the Republican party at the time, which was to not “speak ill of another Republican”; he often spoke this way of Jimmy Carter, whose presidency was in disarray. (Gould 292) Because of the turmoil that Carter’s administration had had, Reagan had a clear advantage. In the general election, Reagan won the popular vote 51%-41%, with 489 electoral votes. This was a landslide victory not only for Reagan, but the entire GOP, which regained control of the Senate and strengthened its control of the House by 32 seats. Because he was a more centrist candidate, he attracted bipartisan support, which was a big factor in helping him secure his