Republican Party (United States)

The Republican Party, also known as the Republicans or the Grand Old Party or GOP, is the smaller of the two major parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party, with approximately 33.2 million registered supporters. It was originally the more liberal of the two major parties, but is now more conservative than the Democratic Party. Its heraldic animal is the elephant. Its origin, like the Democratic donkey, goes back to the cartoonist Thomas Nast. The unofficial party color has been red since 2000. In TV shows or media reports, senators and party members of the Republican Party are usually depicted with an "(R)" after their name.

The party was founded in 1854 with the particular aim of restricting or abolishing slavery in the United States. It achieved this goal after the victory of the Northern states in the War of Secession, which had been triggered by the election of Abraham Lincoln as US president, the first Republican to hold that office. Since the 1960s, Republicans have increasingly turned to right-wing conservatives and evangelical voters.

Donald Trump (2017 to 2021) was the 19th president to be held by Republicans. During the same period, 11 presidents were Democrats. Since 1988, however, Republican presidential candidates have won a majority of the electoral votes only once (in 2004); in 2000 and 2016, GOP candidates moved into the White House only because of the peculiarities of the U.S. electoral system. The chairwoman of the party's national organizing body, the Republican National Committee, has been Ronna Romney McDaniel since January 2017.

History

Foundation

The Republican Party was founded on 28 February 1854 in Ripon (Wisconsin) on the idea of Alvan E. Bovay as a party against the expansion of slavery (→ abolitionism). It had nothing to do with the namesake Democratic-Republican Party of Thomas Jefferson, with which it is often confused and from which the Democratic Party emerged. The National Republican Party of Henry Clay can also only indirectly be considered its predecessor, especially since many in that party later worked for the Whigs. A large number of the northern part of the Whig Party then found themselves in the new party after the Republican Party formation, and also brought in elements of their earlier party platform. At the latest after the outbreak of the Civil War, many Northern Democrats (especially from rural areas in areas with fertile soil and few land leases) also switched to the Republicans because of the increasing dominance of the South in their party. The party's first convention was held in Jackson, Michigan, on July 6, 1854. Members of the Whig Party were joined by parts of the Free Soil Party and the American Party.

Civil War and Republican Dominance (1860-1896)

In the disputes over slavery, their opponents rallied around the Republicans, who also managed to get Abraham Lincoln (who had already been elected to Congress for the Whigs in 1846) elected as the first Republican president in 1860. The presidential election of 1864 took place during the Civil War, whose end was already foreseeable. Only states loyal to the Union were allowed to vote. The Republicans, the Northern Democrats, and parts of the Southern Democrats who remained loyal to the Union contested the election under the name National Union Party. The candidate was the Republican President Abraham Lincoln, the vice-presidential candidate the Southern Democrat Andrew Johnson. On January 31, 1865, the Republicans succeeded in abolishing slavery throughout the United States against the votes of the Democrats, who voted almost unanimously against the Emancipation Act in the Senate and House of Representatives. With Lincoln's assassination, the presidency fell to his original Democratic vice president, Andrew Johnson. Johnson advocated lenient treatment of the defeated Southern states, but the radical wing of the Republicans continued to insist on giving African Americans in the former slave states the same civil rights as whites and enforcing their observance through continued military presence. They prevailed over Johnson on this in 1867. This ensured that the Republicans were so hated by white Southerners as abolitionists and "Negro friends" that they did not prevail against the Democrats in any election there for over eighty years after the last occupation troops left in 1877. After the election of 1868, the White House again went to the Republicans, who dominated United States politics for about half a century. During this time, there was only one Democratic president: Grover Cleveland, who was elected president for four years in both 1884 and 1892.

Originally, the main Republican bastions were the Northeast, the Midwest, and the West Coast, while the Democrats dominated the South (where the Republicans were considered hated Yankees) and the more sparsely populated part of the West (if the area had joined the Confederacy as a state). Since the 1964 presidential election, the political orientation of the southern states in particular changed massively. (→ Solid South).

The progressive era (1896-1921)

From 1896 - with the election of William McKinley, who was followed in 1901 by Theodore Roosevelt after his assassination - progressivism gained power in the Republican Party. However, in 1912, under Roosevelt's successor William Howard Taft - who entered the White House in 1909 - the party split into the conservatives, who supported Taft in his 1912 re-election, and the progressives, who strongly supported Roosevelt's presidential bid for the Progressive Party he had founded. Accordingly, the Republican electorate also split; Roosevelt got 27.4% and Taft got 23.2%. Thus, the Democrats managed to win the 1912 election with Woodrow Wilson. For the 1916 election, Roosevelt refrained from running for the Progressive Party and supported the Republican candidate Charles Evans Hughes. Thus the Progressive Party disbanded, and many returned to the Republican Party. There the conservatives, who had gained considerable influence by leaving the Progressive Republicans in the meantime, now set the tone.

The Conservative Era (1921-1933)

When the Republicans had three presidents in the 1920s, Warren G. Harding, Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, they pursued extremely conservative policies. Economically, they advocated strict economic liberalism. This approach resulted in considerable economic growth until Black Thursday. However, when the Great Depression began in 1929, the Republicans lacked alternative approaches to economic policy.

Opposition in the thirties and forties (1933-1953)

For this reason, the Democratic candidate Franklin D. Roosevelt clearly prevailed over the incumbent Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. Roosevelt was able to clearly prevail against incumbent Herbert Hoover in the 1932 presidential election. The reforms introduced by Roosevelt are called the New Deal and were very popular with the people. Thus, the Republicans lost a large portion of the Northern working class, which had been their main voting base for decades, to the Democrats. At first, Republicans fundamentally opposed the New Deal, but by the 1940s Republicans began to accept large parts of the New Deal and to move away from the conservative economic policies of the 1920s. Thus, in the 1936 presidential election, progressive Republican Alf Landon, who like his vice-presidential running mate Frank Knox had supported Theodore Roosevelt's Progressive Party in 1912, became the nominee. Landon, in contrast to Harding's, Coolidge's, and Hoover's laissez-faire economic policies, favored government intervention in the economy and some aspects of the New Deal. Thomas E. Dewey, the presidential candidate in 1944 and 1948, also opposed only certain parts of the New Deal. However, both lost elections to Presidents Roosevelt (1933-1945) and Harry S. Truman (1945-1953), and thus the Democrats provided the president for 20 years.

Especially since 1948, when the supporters of segregation were defeated by liberal politicians from the North at the Democratic Convention and then temporarily left the party, the Democrats slowly moved to the left in the process. As a result, right-wing conservative voters across the country, but especially supporters of segregation in Southern states, felt less and less represented by the Democrats (see Dixiecrats). But at first, Republicans were reluctant to pander to these voters in turn.

Eisenhower, Nixon and Ford (1953-1976)

The popular, politically moderate World War II general Dwight D. Eisenhower was offered the presidential nomination of their party by both the Republicans and the Democrats. He allowed himself to be nominated by the Republicans in 1952 and was victorious in the 1952 and 1956 elections. Under Eisenhower, regulations on the economy were scaled back, however, Eisenhower left the New Deal in place and increased the minimum wage, much to the chagrin of conservative Republicans. Eisenhower's moderate domestic and foreign policies found little support among the very conservative and anti-communist wing of the Republicans around Joseph McCarthy and Barry Goldwater.

Eisenhower's vice president, Richard Nixon, who was also a moderate at the time, narrowly lost to John F. Kennedy in the 1960 election. After Kennedy's assassination, Lyndon B. Johnson took over the government and quickly began a major reform program. As a result, the Republicans, who had still committed themselves to civil rights policies in their 1960 platform, moved to the right and began to increasingly court Christian conservative voters in rural areas. The latter, especially in the southern states, reacted negatively to the civil rights policies that many Democrats had been pursuing since 1948. The civil rights legislation of 1964 was still passed by more Republican than Democratic congressmen, but the party's shift to the right began immediately thereafter: conservative New Deal and Civil Rights Act opponent Barry Goldwater, who had surprisingly defeated moderate Nelson Rockefeller in the primaries, ran for the Republican ticket against Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, arguing that the recently passed anti-segregation laws violated states' rights. He failed nationally by a wide margin, but won a majority of white voters in the southern states.

As a result, the conservative wing briefly lost weight again, but the Republicans' shift to the right was initiated. Richard Nixon in particular now developed the Southern Strategy, which successfully attempted to bind hitherto Democratic voters in the southern states, who rejected Johnson's desegregation and equal rights for blacks, to the Republicans instead. At the same time, many Dixiecrats left the Democrats and some joined the Republicans. During these years, the electorate and programmatic orientation of both Democrats and Republicans changed significantly. Since then, the Republicans have been the more conservative of the two parties.

Nixon ran again in 1968, this time with a clearly right-wing conservative agenda, and won the presidency, which he defended by a large majority in 1972. As president, however, Nixon pursued a moderate domestic agenda. For example, he pushed through a series of measures to protect the environment. Under him, the National Environmental Protection Agency was created. Nixon also either left in place or even supplemented the Great Society programs to expand the welfare state that had been passed under his Democratic predecessor, Johnson. Despite a further military escalation in the Vietnam War in the early phase of his administration, he pursued a policy of détente with the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China under Henry Kissinger's leadership. Among other things, this led to several significant arms agreements with both powers. The Watergate affair finally led to Nixon's resignation in 1974. His vice-president, the liberal abortion advocate Gerald Ford, who belonged to the moderate wing of the party, succeeded him as president and continued the previous course in both domestic and foreign policy. In the face of opposition from the conservative wing of the party, he appointed the liberal Nelson Rockefeller as vice president, which snubbed the right wing of the party. Also, as one of his first acts in office, he pardoned his predecessor of all "crimes which the latter had consciously or unconsciously committed against the United States" in order to draw a line under the Watergate chapter and prevent damage to the office of the president in the event of a trial of Nixon. Some historians argue that while Ford thus succeeded in reuniting the country, he laid the groundwork for his electoral defeat. In the November 1974 midterm elections, Republicans lost four seats in the Senate and 48 in the House. The oil price crisis of 1973 and the following economic recession favoured the defeat of the Republicans in the 1976 elections against Jimmy Carter, whereby the right-wing conservative wing around the Goldwater supporter and Ford opponent Ronald Reagan, who had already attacked Ford massively in the election campaign, gained very strong weight and finally asserted itself. Within the framework of the Southern Strategy, the white voters in the southern states, who had been alienated from the Democrats by the civil rights policy, were now courted more successfully than ever. Since then, in the former Southern states, which had been Democratic-dominated for decades since the Civil War, Republicans generally won the majority of white electoral votes. The party also discovered the rejection of abortion and contraception as a further core issue, in order to attract evangelical voters. Since then, critics have regularly accused the party of pursuing a one-sided economic policy aimed at benefiting the wealthy by appealing to the resentments and prejudices of its voters, who are thus seduced into acting against their own economic interests.

From Reagan to Bush (1980-2009)

Ronald Reagan cemented this political realignment of the Republicans with landslide victories in the 1980 and 1984 elections; under him, the New Right gained power. A major influence on the New Right was William F. Buckley, Jr. , who was host of the television show Firing Line from 1966 to 1999. In 1984, Ronald Reagan won nearly 60% of the popular vote and every state except Minnesota and the District of Columbia. This gave him 525 of 538 electoral votes.

In addition to the Southern Strategy, the combination of Christian conservative social policy and neoliberal economic policy (Reaganomics) is seen as the main reason for Reagan's landslide victories: he lowered the top income tax rate from 70% to 33%, cut social benefits, moved the Republicans significantly further to the right, successfully wooed evangelicals and their Moral Majority organization (something Goldwater and Nixon had still rejected), and took the economic policy of the 1920s, before the New Deal, as his model. For example, he said his role model as president was Calvin Coolidge, and espoused the trickle-down theory that massive tax cuts for the wealthy should lead to more jobs and more prosperity for everyone in the long run. This economic policy is now regarded by most experts as an aberration, since it led to a growing national debt and a widening gap between rich and poor, but it initially convinced many citizens and remains the core of Republican economic doctrine to this day. In this way, Reagan established an alliance of right-wing conservatives, Christian fundamentalists and neo-liberal voters on which the Republicans were to rely for the next 35 years (New Right Coalition).

The term "Reagan Democrats" is used to describe the voters who at that time were generally more inclined towards the Democrats, but who voted for Reagan in these elections. These were mostly white workers. According to Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, these "Reagan Democrats" no longer saw their own party as representing the middle and working classes, but as a party that instead cared about the welfare of members of ethnic minorities, such as African Americans in particular, which is why they voted for Reagan instead. Republican voters since that time have increasingly been primarily religious whites, with a preponderance of men.

Due to the aftermath of the Iran-Contra affair, which also damaged the president's reputation, as well as the stock market crash of the fall of 1987, the continuation of a Republican reign in the White House in the last year of Ronald Reagan's presidency seemed more than doubtful. Vice President George Bush, who had won a commanding victory over Senator Bob Dole in the primaries, was trailing his Democratic challenger, Michael Dukakis, by more than 17 percentage points in the late summer polls. The Bush campaign team, led by Lee Atwater, subsequently aimed to discredit Dukakis in the public eye through an unprecedented smear campaign. With the help of numerous negative campaign ads questioning the suitability of the Democratic presidential candidate, Bush managed to turn around an almost hopeless deficit. He won the November 1988 election handily, winning 40 states, 426 electoral votes, and more than seven million votes ahead in the Popular Vote. However, because he belonged to the moderate wing of the party, unlike Reagan, conservative Senator Dan Quayle succeeded Bush as vice president to satisfy the right. Bush tried, among other things, to make the Republicans attractive to Hispanics as well, but when he compromised with the Democrats in 1990 to consolidate the budget, there was a revolt against Bush by the right wing, led by Newt Gingrich, in which the now dominant position that political compromise should be seen as weakness or even treason began to prevail. After defeating Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, nothing seemed to stand in the way of re-election in February 1991. At that time, the president had a popular approval rating of nearly 89%. Within 18 months, however, this figure had fallen by 60% to a low of 29% when the Democrats chose Bill Clinton as their presidential candidate in July 1992. At the same time, the economic boom of the Reagan era had begun to fade, and the emerging economic crisis of the early 1990s not only ended the longest peacetime period of economic growth to that point, but also caused the unemployment rate to rise to 7.5% - the highest level since 1984. Bush's foreign policy successes, such as his successful mediation in the reunification of Germany or in the Middle East, paled in comparison. The Democrats were able to expose Bush's political Achilles heel with the campaign slogan "It's the economy, stupid!". The race riots in Los Angeles in the summer of 1992 also did not reflect well on the Republican campaign. At the same time, many Republican voters, and especially the right wing of the party, felt betrayed by Bush, who had previously campaigned by saying "read my lips, no new taxes!" ("read my lips, no new taxes!"), had raised taxes contrary to his promise. All of this contributed to his defeat in 1992, notwithstanding his foreign policy successes, by the Democratic governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton, who, himself a Southerner, also attracted an unusually large number of voters in Southern states. In addition, Ross Perot, running as an independent third-party candidate, had cost Bush many votes. After the defeat, the conservative wing around Gingrich took the lead in the party in early 1994 as part of the so-called Republican Revolution and was able to take the majority in the House of Representatives from the Democrats. However, Gingrich ultimately failed to push through the measures promised for this eventuality.

In the 1996 election, moderate Senator Bob Dole, who was critical of tax cuts and pro-abortion, ran against incumbent Bill Clinton. By choosing his vice-presidential running mate, ex-Building Secretary Jack Kemp, who opposed abortion and had been one of the initiators of tax-cutting programs during Ronald Reagan's presidency, Dole hoped to satisfy the economic liberals and anti-abortionists in the party. With the Republican victory in the 1994 mid-term elections and the resulting majorities in both chambers, the GOP succeeded in forcing President Clinton to adopt a strongly conservative political course. Together with Senator Joe Biden of Delaware and the conservative wing of the party, the president pushed for the passage of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (also known as the 1994 Crime Bill), pushed for the expansion of the death penalty, and, with a "law and order" program, managed to take away the Republicans' argument that the Democrats were too "soft" on crime. Under Clinton's presidency, the crime rate also dropped significantly after almost three decades of continuous increases, which would also prove favorable for the Democrats in the coming elections. With a rightward shift of the Democrats forced by the Republicans themselves after the first two years of Clinton's presidency, the party had thus done itself no favors with regard to the 1996 elections, since Bob Dole as a challenger could thus only minimally distinguish himself from the president. In addition, the government shutdown forced by Republican majority leader Newt Gingrich at the turn of the year 1995-96 due to disagreements over the next budget led, on the one hand, to the first budget surpluses since the 1960s, but on the other hand, the successful averting of the disputes over the budget for fiscal year 1996 was attributed by the public and the media primarily to the incumbent president and his successful negotiating tactics. Even stable economic development, unlike two years earlier, did not give rise to any real mood of change this time. As the election year progressed, the incumbent's lead was therefore never seriously threatened, and Dole never got above the 40 % mark throughout the campaign, even with billionaire and independent candidate Ross Perot once again coming off the top. In the end, Clinton won handily with over 220 electoral votes and nearly eight million electoral votes to spare. Although the Republicans expanded their majority in the Senate and, despite losses, also retained the majority in the House of Representatives, this was also the biggest Republican defeat since the 1964 presidential election. In the period that followed, the tone of the domestic political dispute intensified considerably when the Republicans unsuccessfully initiated impeachment proceedings against Clinton, who had initially denied a private affair with an intern. Since the president's policies were also popular with many conservative Americans, the Republicans tried to weaken him with moral attacks, but failed. These years also saw the party's rapprochement with the US gun lobby; since then, most Republicans have held an extremely expansive interpretation of the Second Amendment. Many observers also link the increasing radicalization to the influence of the Fox News Channel, founded in 1996, whose right-wing conservative-leaning broadcasts - such as those of Sean Hannity - reach many Republicans. Conservative radio shows, such as those hosted by Rush Limbaugh, are another factor that has helped Republicans move to the right. In the 1998 congressional elections, the Republicans suffered a significant defeat, as a result of which Gingrich had to resign.

In the 2000 Republican primaries, Texas Governor George W. Bush, son of the 41st president, prevailed over, among others, former Vice President Dan Quayle, Senator John McCain, former Secretary of Labor Elizabeth Dole (her husband Bob had lost to Clinton in 1996), Forbes Magazine Editor-in-Chief Steve Forbes, House Budget Committee Chairman John Kasich, and Alan Keyes. As his vice presidential running mate, Bush chose former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, who had been one of the contributors to the U.S. victory in the Second Gulf War under Bush's father. Since Bush had no foreign policy experience, Cheney was to make up for it. In the election, Bush won a good 500,000 votes less in the popular vote than his competitor, Democratic Vice President Al Gore, but narrowly prevailed in the Electoral College with 271 votes to 266. Due to irregularities in several crucial states, such as Florida in particular, which was governed by Bush's brother Jeb, the legitimacy of the election was widely doubted; the decision (Bush v. Gore) of the then Republican-dominated Supreme Court to cancel the recount of the votes in Florida, thus declaring Bush the winner, remains controversial to this day, especially since it was determined that in fact Gore would have achieved the majority had the recount been completed. That year also saw the color red become commonplace for the Republican Party, as the irregularities in the election meant that the electoral maps, in which major media outlets had chosen to show Republicans red and Democrats blue, were present long after the actual election.

In the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, President Bush and the neoconservatives who supported him gained great political support as the insecure population rallied behind the administration. The 2001 Afghan War immediately followed the attacks, and Bush still had the near-unanimous support of Republicans and most Democrats in Congress for the 2003 Iraq War. Bush justified the war with the claim that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, which in retrospect proved to be false. Domestically, the Patriot Act severely curtailed civil liberties. Many Republicans also advocate the use of interrogation methods, which critics call torture, to this day as part of the War on Terror. On the other hand, Bush significantly expanded government health care, especially for seniors, which earned him harsh criticism from neoliberals in the party.

In the 2002 mid-term elections, which were still under the impression of the terrorist attacks the year before, the Republicans were able to expand their majority in the House of Representatives and win that in the Senate. Thus, for the first time in a long time, one party controlled the Senate, the House of Representatives, and the White House; but the Republicans did not take advantage of this favorable opportunity to implement necessary reforms. Unopposed, Bush won the party's primaries for the 2004 presidential election and went on to defeat John Kerry on his platform of A safer world and a more hopeful America. This was the only presidential election since 1988 in which the Republicans won the majority of the electoral votes. They also slightly increased their majority in Congress again. However, they lost this in the 2006 mid-term elections, as a growing number of voters now considered the Iraq war a mistake and felt deceived by the Republicans.

The Rise of the Tea Party and Donald Trump (since 2009)

In the primaries for the 2008 election, Senator John McCain from Arizona prevailed. Before the primaries, former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani was still considered the Republican favorite. Early 2008 saw a three-way battle between the neoconservative McCain, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, an evangelical, and the economic liberal former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, which McCain won early. As his vice presidential running mate, he nominated Alaska Governor Sarah Palin. Palin quickly drew ridicule, as she was accused in particular of cluelessness about foreign policy.

In the 2008 election, McCain lost to Democrat Barack Obama, who replaced George W. Bush in the White House in early 2009. This election marked a turning point. In fundamental opposition to Obama, as well as in response to the financial crisis beginning in 2007, the party moved further and further to the right by opening up to the Tea Party movement beginning in 2009. A major role in the rise of the Tea Party was played by radio and Fox News host Glenn Beck. Just two years later, the party managed to recapture a majority in the House of Representatives in congressional elections with the help of the Tea Party and, with its speaker John Boehner, stalled presidential reforms. But by opening itself up to the Tea Party, which combines radical market-liberal concepts with Christian evangelical moral concepts and demands an absolutely uncompromising course vis-à-vis the Democrats, the Republican Party was able to achieve short-term electoral successes, but at the same time lost its ability to compromise and act in the long term. Between 2006 and 2016, moreover, the proportion of female Republican representatives in the House of Representatives fell from 11 to 9 percent, while for the Democrats it grew from 21 to 33 percent in the same period.

Mitt Romney, an economic liberal, was nominated as the next Republican presidential candidate after he prevailed in the primaries against former House Speaker Newt Gingrich and former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum. Before the primaries, Texas Governor Rick Perry was still considered the favorite. As his vice presidential running mate, Romney nominated Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan, who at the time was chairman of the House Budget Committee. Romney, who had moved significantly to the right during the primaries under pressure from the Tea Party, however, lost unexpectedly badly to incumbent President Barack Obama in the 2012 election, receiving only 47.2% of the votes cast. At the same time, however, with the support of the Tea Party, radicals such as Ted Cruz entered Congress, many of whom fundamentally rejected cooperation with Obama and compromise with the Democrats and also opposed their own party leadership. The appeal of several Republican politicians to take more liberal positions in the future, especially on immigration and social policy, and to be more willing to compromise overall in order to become more electable for Latinos and blacks, went unheard under these conditions. In 2013, under Cruz's leadership, an attempt was made in vain to force the president to rescind the health care reform through a temporary government shutdown. Republicans have also held a majority in the Senate since the 2014 midterm elections, as Democrats have traditionally been less successful in motivating their constituents to vote, except in presidential elections. The influence of the far right in the party grew even more in the process; as early as 2014, for example, the Republican majority leader in the House of Representatives, Eric Cantor, was surprisingly defeated in the primaries by a largely unknown candidate from the ranks of the Tea Party and switched to the private sector. In 2015, Boehner, who was seen as too willing to compromise, was forced to resign. His successor was Paul Ryan.

In the Republican primaries for the 2016 election, Donald Trump, a businessman and entertainer who had never held political office and had only recently joined the party, came out on top in an unusually large field of candidates (including Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, John Kasich and Ted Cruz), surprising many observers. Trump had dominated the primary campaign in particular with highly controversial statements about Latinos and Muslims, harsh attacks on the political establishment and numerous taboo-breaking statements. In July 2016, the Republican Party convention in Cleveland chose him as the presidential candidate. This is considered the deepest break in party history in several decades: Many observers assumed that this meant the end of the New Right, since Trump professed neither cuts in the welfare state nor Christian conservative moral values, but relied entirely on white and predominantly male middle- and working-class voters who saw their social and economic status threatened. Trump announced that as president he would massively cut taxes for high earners and at the same time increase social spending; in order to be able to finance this, free trade was to be restricted and thus the US economy strengthened. In addition, there were sensational calls for a general ban on Muslims entering the country and the construction of a wall on the Mexican border; Trump also announced that he would put Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in prison if she won the election. A number of prominent Republicans, including John Kasich, Mitt Romney and George W. Bush, refused to endorse Trump. Others, like John McCain, withdrew it from him in October 2016, when Trump came under pressure from a series of scandals and his poll numbers plummeted. However, Trump prevailed over Clinton in the November 8, 2016 election. The Republicans were also able to maintain control of Congress, although Trump only garnered 46.1% of the electoral vote (lower than Romney in 2012): Clinton received about 2,900,000 more votes than Trump, but the Republican narrowly won the crucial swing states and therefore still achieved a majority in the Electoral College.

Under Trump, the division of American society has worsened. The attempt to abolish Obamacare, as announced, failed. A tax reform was passed that was committed to the trickle-down theory and provided relief above all for companies and the wealthy: the economic upswing that had already begun under Obama continued, but at the same time the budget deficit grew by leaps and bounds due to the tax cut. Trump also pursued a controversial protectionist economic policy that used punitive tariffs and represented a radical departure from the free trade policy that the Republicans had advocated until then. Under the slogan America First, the administration also pursued a foreign policy that accorded less importance to alliances such as NATO and previous close allies such as the EU, and in many cases no longer relied on international cooperation but on competition. Among other things, Trump announced the US withdrawal from the Paris climate agreement. In the 2018 mid-term elections, the Republicans then lost their majority in the House of Representatives again after eight years, suffering the biggest loss of votes since Watergate. The Senate, on the other hand, remained in Republican hands. In late 2019, the House of Representatives voted to impeach Trump, who was accused of blackmailing the Ukrainian government into investigating Democratic politician Joe Biden by withholding aid money. The Republican-dominated Senate subsequently refused to hear witnesses, instead acquitting the president of the charges on summary judgment in early 2020. Mitt Romney was the only Republican senator to vote for impeachment.

Trump emerged stronger from the failed impeachment trial, and many observers expected him to be re-elected, especially because of the good economic situation. But when the global Covid 19 pandemic hit the US with particular force from March 2020 onwards, this changed, as the economy now slumped and the president's crisis management, which had long played down the threat of the disease, failed to convince many voters.

In the presidential election in November of the same year, Trump was defeated by his Democratic challenger Joe Biden; however, he refused to acknowledge his defeat, instead claiming, without being able to present any evidence, that he had been the victim of a conspiracy and large-scale electoral fraud: although Trump was able to garner over 73 million votes, more than any incumbent before him, Biden still surpassed this result by a good 7 million votes. In the concurrent elections for the House of Representatives, on the other hand, Republicans gained seats but remained in the minority. In early January 2021, in the wake of two runoff elections, they lost two Senate seats from Georgia and with them the majority in the Senate. The subsequent storming of the Capitol in Washington in 2021, by which thousands of supporters of the President-elect wanted to violently prevent the certification of the election results, failed and led, on the one hand, to an increase in the number of members leaving the GOP and, on the other hand, to the initiation of a second impeachment trial against Donald Trump. Ten Republican congressmen also voted to initiate the proceedings in the process. The impeachment proceedings ended with an acquittal for Trump after the majority of the Senate Republican caucus, which held half of the 100 Senate seats, did not vote for a conviction, falling short of the necessary two-thirds majority in the Senate.

Since the impeachment, there has been a directional battle raging in the Republican Party between a Trump and an anti-Trump wing. This is particularly evident in Trump's statement of the Big Lie, that is, that the election was stolen. This led to a climax of the intra-party power struggle other end Liz Cheney lost her position in the caucus leadership of the Republican caucus in the House of Representatives. More information about the non-recognition of the election and the power struggle of the Republicans is in the article Big Lie.

Donald Trump, President from 2017 to 2021


George W. Bush, President from 2001 to 2009


Ronald Reagan, President from 1981 to 1989


Theodore Roosevelt, President from 1901 to 1909


George H. W. Bush, President from 1989 to 1993


Abraham Lincoln, President from 1861 to 1865


Richard Nixon, President from 1969 to 1974

Republican Party platform and electorate.

The greatest contrast between Republicans and Democrats is the desired balance between autonomy and centralism. While Democrats today tend to concentrate as many powers as possible on the federal government in Washington, D.C., the Republican Party has favored state self-government and economic deregulation since the 1960s. The many grassroots elements of local government have also traditionally been Republican concerns.

The Republicans, like the Democrats, are a coalition of different interest groups, since coalition-building in a first-past-the-post system - unlike in a proportional representation system - must take place within the parties (and not between the parties). Republicans get their votes from a variety of demographic groups. In the southern states and other parts of the country such as Alaska, the party usually receives strong support in small and medium-sized towns. One of the next largest Republican voter groups is the more simple rural population in the many smaller states between Oklahoma in the south and the border with Canada in the north, as well as in the many other more sparsely populated areas of the United States, while the coastal regions tend to vote Democratic. In the larger cities, Republicans also often receive many votes from the middle class living in the suburbs. In addition to support among the religious right, the party also finds support among economic liberals and proponents of a lean state; characteristic is a deep skepticism toward the welfare state, which is interpreted as contradictory to individual responsibility and freedom, and the advocacy of a policy of rearmament and the self-conscious pursuit of national self-interest, even if these do not receive majority support within the United Nations.

The Republican Party is a suburban and rural party. In city councils, Republicans only had a share of around 20% at the beginning of 2014; also at the beginning of 2014, only three of the largest 25 cities in the US were governed by a Republican mayor. The election of Kevin Faulconer in San Diego in February 2014 was considered a big surprise and was only due to low Democratic turnout. Overall, it has been observed for years that well-educated, economically successful voters in urbanized regions of the U.S. are turning away from the GOP: In the 2020 presidential election, Republican candidate Donald Trump won about 46 percent of the electoral districts, but these represented only 29 percent of US economic output.

The Republican-responsible government shutdown in the fall of 2013 led to a temporary estrangement between the party and the business community.

Traditionally, Republicans receive many party donations from defense, tobacco, and oil companies. Unlike most IT companies, Microsoft has significantly increased its donations to Republicans since the Clinton administration brought antitrust lawsuits against the corporation.

In the election campaign, the Republican Party profiles itself against abortion, against the equalization of homosexual partnerships with traditional marriage and against further restrictions on gun ownership. The Republicans also promoted these political positions in their 2008 party manifesto. Preferably in wealthy suburbs, Republicans also campaign on demands for tax cuts and deregulation. Many Republicans tend to be skeptical of environmental protection, seeing it as antithetical to business interests. A large minority among Republican voters also doubt man-made global warming. Republicans also want parents to be allowed to decide for themselves which school their child attends and support the possibility of homeschooling. This is particularly in line with the wishes of Christian fundamentalists among their voters, who often distrust the state education system and consider it too secular.

In the presidential elections of 1996 and 2000, 62 percent of white evangelicals voted for the Grand Old Party. In 2004, as many as 78 percent of them voted for George W. Bush. Donald Trump was also able to unite a clear majority of this group of voters behind him, although not a few evangelicals rejected his private lifestyle - an indication of how closely the GOP was able to bind these voters to itself.

In the disputes over health policy, the doctors' lobby, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies tend to be closer to the Republicans, while lawyers tend to side with the Democrats. The GOP opposes the 2010 health care reform (Obamacare) because it did not protect doctor-patient relationships and, most importantly, did not promote free-market competition. Instead, it supported common-sense reform, which lowered costs and ensured quality. But when the party controlled the federal legislature for two years after Donald Trump's election as president starting in January 2017, it turned out that, contrary to what they had announced, Republicans were unable to replace Obamacare with a realistic alternative.

In twelve almost universally Republican states, convicted felons lose their right to vote for life. The US has the largest prison population in the world. A large proportion of them are black or African-American. Black voters vote up to eighty percent for the Democratic Party. After a referendum in Florida gave former prisoners - with the exception of murderers and sex offenders - their right to vote back in 2018, the Republicans in power there decided that former prisoners could only exercise their right to vote if they had paid off debts related to the sentence they had served. Nearly 1.5 million people, about five percent of Florida's population, had actually regained their right to vote after the referendum, but the Republicans' debt rule held up even after lawsuits were filed in the Florida Supreme Court. In Georgia, too, after losing a Senate election in the spring of 2021, Republicans were nonetheless able to pass election law reform limiting the number of mailboxes for ballots placed on the streets there in the state. Democratic Party voters had favored absentee ballots in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Already in the years leading up to the U.S. presidential election, the governor there, Brian Kemp, had ordered 200 polling places in predominantly Democratic milieus closed and 1.4 million potential voters removed from voting rolls without informing them. In Republican-ruled Texas, just weeks before the 2020 U.S. presidential election, voting conditions were made more difficult in major cities where many voters cast ballots for the Democratic Party. Such restrictions were sought to be expanded and legitimized by the Republican party associations in many states through legislation even after they lost the 2020 U.S. presidential election. For example, as of February 2021, the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law counted a total of 253 proposed laws on voting restrictions in 43 US states. From the beginning of 2021 through May 2021, 19 bills restricting grassroots ballot initiatives were passed in various Republican-ruled U.S. states.

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