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The Republican Party, also referred to as the GOP ("Grand Old party"), is one of the world's oldest extant political parties. It is the second-oldest existing political party in the United States; its chief rival, the Democratic Party, is the oldest.
The Republican Party emerged in 1854 to combat the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the expansion of slavery into American territories. The early Republican Party consisted of African-Americans, northern white Protestants, businessmen, professionals, factory workers, and farmers. The GOP was pro-business, and it supported banks, the gold standard, railroads and high tariffs; the party opposed the expansion of slavery. At its inception, Republican Party had almost no presence in the Southern United States; by 1858, however it had enlisted former Whigs and former Free Soil Democrats to form majorities in nearly every Northern state.
With the election of Abraham Lincoln (the first Republican President) in 1860, the Party's success in guiding the Union to victory in the American 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, Theodore Roosevelt formed the Progressive ("Bull Moose") Party after being rejected by the GOP and ran unsuccessfully as a third-party presidential candidate calling for social reforms. After 1912, many Roosevelt supporters left the Party, and the Party underwent an ideological shift to the right.[1] 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
