The first time that Abraham Lincoln ran for any official position as a member of the Republican Party was in the 1858 Senate election.
Explanation:
Abraham Lincoln, who became the 16th President of the United States from 1861 till his death in 1865, was initially a member, not of the Republican Party, but of the Whig Party, and for a while he practiced his political career until he decided to leave it in favor of his law practice. However, he reentered the political arena in 1854 in response to the Democratic party´s success in allowing the spread of slavery into new lands, and enrolled himself in the Republican Party. The first time he ran for office as a Republican was in a Senate campaign against Democrat Stephen A. Douglas in 1858, which he lost, but for which he became known to the nation, and in 1860 he ran for the presidential elections and won, to become the 16th President of the United States.
