This week’s Republican National Convention in Milwaukee is its 42nd since the party was established in 1854.
The convention is occurring at a powerful moment for the GOP after former President Donald Trump narrowly survived an attempted assassination on July 13.
Former President Trump was formally nominated, along with fellow populist Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), on July 15, by a galvanized and united party.
But while the GOP is today in many ways the party of Trump-style populism, that wasn’t always the case.
At its founding, the GOP favored a strong and dominant central government and an expansive interpretation of the Constitution—very different from today’s GOP, which favors a weaker and more constitutionally limited federal government that emphasizes states’ rights.
At the time, states’ rights were largely seen as the domain of Democrats, whose party was founded in the 1820s.
After a slow start in the 1856 election, by the 1860 election, the Republican Party had become the Democratic Party’s leading rival.
The party’s development into its modern form took time and is a result of the major political shifts and realignments that followed the Civil War into the 20th Century.
The Convention of 1860
The RNC of 1860, held in Chicago, was not the Republicans’ first convention but was arguably its most consequential.In 1856, the party—formed from the remnants of the northern Whigs and the anti-slavery Free Soil movement—won 11 out of 16 free states, quickly becoming the leading party in most northern states.
By 1860, the stakes were higher. Secession seemed a bigger threat than ever, as tensions between the North and South were at a zenith.
At the convention that year, Republicans had a choice between William Seward, a former governor and senator, and Abraham Lincoln, who by then had served in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. House of Representatives.
As would be the case until the 20th Century, nominees were chosen by a vote of party officials rather than by democratic primaries.
Ultimately, Lincoln was chosen. But surprisingly, given his ultimate stature in American history, it took three ballots for him to defeat Seward.
This was largely because Lincoln was seen as a more moderate figure than Seward, though he still emphasized a strong and active central government.
Nevertheless, from the Democratic South’s perspective, Lincoln posed a threat to states’ rights and the institution of slavery.
Thus, almost immediately following the election of President Lincoln in November 1860—in which he won almost every free state and didn’t appear on most southern ballots—South Carolina, and eventually the entire South, would attempt to leave the Union.
The Convention of 1876
By 1876, the GOP was no longer a fledgling third party trying to make a name for itself. It was instead the dominant political force in the postbellum United States.In fact, during the 50-year period between 1860 and 1910, only a single Democrat, Grover Cleveland, was elected president.
But divides in the party still existed—most notably between the radical Republicans, who pushed for wide-reaching federal solutions using expansive constitutional interpretations, and the moderates, who pushed for compromise and swift reconciliation between the North and South.
Additionally, under incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant, Republicans had been rocked by a series of corruption scandals that hurt the party’s image.
These divides were present, too, at the 1876 National Convention, where party delegates ultimately—on the seventh ballot—chose Rutherford B. Hayes as the nominee.
Like Lincoln, Hayes was seen as a moderate who could unite the party. He supported civil service reform, which appealed to Republicans seeking to distance themselves from the corruption of the Grant administration.
James G. Blaine, a Maine Republican who served as speaker of the House and later as a senator, was the initial favorite. However, he faced pushback due to his involvement in a Grant scandal.
Hayes won the presidency—but not before the country endured a constitutional crisis.
Due to disputed results in four states where the Republican candidate and Democrat Samuel Tilden both claimed victory, Congress had to intervene to reach a compromise.
The Convention of 1880
At the 1880 RNC, delegates dealt with something unprecedented in American politics—Grant was seeking a third term in the Oval Office.While not technically prohibited yet, there was a strong tradition in American politics of stepping down after two terms.
Delegates’ reluctance to break these rules and the scandals that marked the Grant administration hurt his chances for the nomination from the beginning.
Still, in the first round of balloting, Grant won the most votes. Blaine, again seeking the nomination, won second most. James A. Garfield, who ultimately won the nomination, received none.
By this point, the Republican Party had few major divides on issues, with only civil service reform remaining controversial.
With the end of Reconstruction, much of the lingering tension of the Civil War had begun to dissipate between Democrats and Republicans, many of whom pushed for reconciliation.
Throughout 35 rounds of balloting, Grant maintained a strong lead, closely followed by Blaine.
On the 36th ballot, Garfield won the nomination as a compromise candidate, seen as strong on civil service reform and open to continuing national reconciliation between the North and South. He also won the presidency.
But just months into his tenure, Garfield was assassinated by a disgruntled civil service official, angry he hadn’t gotten a job in the administration.
The Convention of 1912
Thirty-two years later, the Republican Party had again changed dramatically.Progressivism, today largely used to refer to the left-wing, was in vogue with everyone in politics at the time, including Republicans.
But some Republicans, such as President William Howard Taft, remained too open to conservative ideals for some of the Republican progressives—most notably, for his predecessor President Theodore Roosevelt.
This split between progressives and conservatives in the party was on full display in 1912—and ultimately led to the election of only the second Democrat president since the Civil War.
When he left office in 1908, Roosevelt had chosen Taft as his successor.
But since then, Taft’s proclivity to side with conservatives on key issues had divided the party.
Thus, in 1912, Roosevelt became the second person, after Grant, to seek a third term in office.
As it was in 1880, delegates wouldn’t have it, ultimately selecting incumbent Taft for a second term. He won on the first ballot with the majority of the votes.
Infuriated by his poor showing during the nominating process, Roosevelt and his supporters formed their own party—the Bull Moose Party—that split the vote and gave Democrat Woodrow Wilson the White House.
The Convention of 1980
Decades later, the 1980 RNC encapsulated social and political shifts that had been building over generations.During that convention, former California Gov. Ronald Reagan, a staunch conservative who favored a limited federal government and states’ rights, won win the nomination.
After his nomination, Republicans shifted their focus away from the urbanized centers of the Northeast that had once formed the party’s traditional base toward the South and other predominantly rural and suburban areas.
By that point, previous candidates had already laid the groundwork in the South, where Republicans had begun to chip away at the Democrat stranglehold on Southern politics.
Indeed, in 1964, GOP nominee Arizona Sen. Barry Goldwater, seen by many as the first coming of Reagan’s conservative messaging in Republican politics, won the entire Deep South—South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. He was the first Republican in American history to do so. He was defeated by Democrat incumbent President Lyndon B. Johnson, who was elected to his first full term after taking office upon the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963.
Later, President Richard Nixon capitalized on the South’s attitudes toward states’ rights, and in 1972, he became the first Republican to win the entire South.
That represented a monumental shift in a region where, just decades earlier, Democrats had regularly gained more than 90 percent of the vote.
The Convention of 2016
The final Republican shift in the modern era was highlighted at the 2016 RNC.For most of its history, including through the Reagan era, the GOP was seen in many ways as a party of the elites and business interests.
By contrast, then-candidate Donald Trump—whose favorite president was Democrat Andrew Jackson—was propelled to the nomination through populist messaging much more in the vein of the historical Democratic Party, which for most of its own history relied on such messaging.
It was a departure from the business interests that had formed the backbone of the GOP up to that point.
Pushing back against the shift, an anti-Trump group made a last-ditch attempt at the convention to deprive Trump of the nomination. The move was shut down by the rules committee.
The shift brought many working-class states in the Rust Belt out of the “Blue Wall” that had propelled many Democrats to Electoral College victories in the past.
Eight years later, the party’s new base—including many working-class people and minorities—remains highly populist and distrustful of elites.
The party’s future, meanwhile, is up in the air.
It remains to be seen whether populism will remain the most powerful political force in the GOP or if it will eventually return to the elitism that has marked it for most of its history.
